Sinae Yoo

On view in Der Würfel: S. F. Kislev "Mother and Child"

Neumeister Bar-Am presents Sinae Yoo’s first solo exhibition in Germany: Guilt Trip. Yoo’s practice encompasses multiple media. Dancing Eyes is a single installation made of two video works, accompanied by a series of paintings on paper.

The first video captures dancers and performers hired to celebrate the opening of stores in public shopping districts in Seoul, and the light displays of illegal party buses that prey on a lonely, elderly audience. Exhibited on an oversized intercom interface, these images of gyrating dancers and fatigued mascots on break, place the viewer in the morally awkward position of monitoring from afar these faceless bodies, as they hover between exhaustion and spectacle.

The second video, shown on a monitor, intercuts images of still convulsing dead animals about to be turned into food-stuff, with scenes from Dancing Eyes, a 1996 arcade game from which this exhibition derives its title, which show the undressing of crudely rendered woman by way of game-play. The sickening sense of dread that permeates these garishly-colored hyper-commodified bodies, neither dead nor alive, is further reinforced by the score, which Yoo composed in collaboration with American sound artist Sentinel.

Rather than placing herself in a ‘critical’, moralizing position, Yoo’s work grapples openly with its morbid fascinations, weighing her own capacity to fabricate aesthetic distance, to derive pleasure from the commodification of her subject’s vitality, with a melancholic search for empathy.

Text by Ché Zara Blomfield

Sinae Yoo, Pyeongtaek, Korea, 1985 – lives and works in Seoul and Bern. Working with diverse materials in the fields of installation, sculpture and video, Sinae Yoo focuses on topics present in daily life and pop culture, always investigating in the relationship between virtual and physical realities. She completed her Masters at Bern University of the Arts, Bern and BA at Sejong University, Seoul. Solo exhibitions include: at sic!Raum für Kunst, Luzern (2017); The Gallery Apart, Rome and Kunsthaus Langenthal (both 2016). Among many other group exhibitions, she participated in the Daojiao art festival in Guangzhou, China; Neumeister Bar-Am, Berlin; Centre Pasqu’Art, Biel; Kunsthaus Langenthal (all 2016), Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2015). In 2016, she was awarded the Aeschlimann Corti Award, which is known as the largest private art prize in the Canton of Bern.