DISEUSE (2024) multimedia animated 4 channel video installation (9 minute loop)

“there was no displacing death, there was no overcoming without the actual dying. She says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live.” -Dictée (1982), page 141

The struggle to exist in such a confusing world, the search over and over for whatever one is looking for. Cha wrote words and created images and sequences with this craving evident, with care and a passionate love for creating, communicating and living and feeling intensely.

I mean not to martyr cha or make her death a metaphor because it is not. She did not die willingly. Rather I hope to honour her work and intentions as a Korean American artist 40-50 years later, who sees deep similarities in our condition even in a world that seems worlds away from hers.

A highlight compilation of the 9 minute loop:

This project was inspired by the work and life of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), and made possible by the Husted Summer Scholarship and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

i could only exist in (2023) multi-media animated 5 channel video installation

it’s a new world

now im doing my thing even though it doesnt make sense

I always joke that I am a person who could only exist in 2023. With my recent works, I feel that I am reaching out to explore what it means to explore or define an identity which is unprecedented. Without the limitations or fear of narcissism, or self-centeredness, I have decided to deeply indulge with what exactly it means to be someone that has maybe never existed, obviously literally but also racially and culturally. This is of course not a scientific statement, more a more intimate and serious examination of the self-satirization of my exoticized, mixed Asian American identity.

Technology is giving space for new identities in more decentralised American media. I am playing with the bounds of that. To be someone who never existed takes on a kind of world-building. What better way to create a completely new world and landscape of self, than a tool with access to all information, history, knowledge, bias, bigotry, culture, and the over-glamorized buzz of new technology- AI? These images, made by AI and manipulated by me are images that have never existed.

They are a product of all information and slow-cooked bias, American culture, and although robotic, are at the mercy of human error. My world, my self, is the same. It is liberating to create my own little world, my own self, and have a hand in manipulating and curating from this beacon of history, world and culture. What oral history and politics hide I can uncover, without needing any longer to rely on lost family, records, history and sentiment lost through distance, language, suppression and historical movement.

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julia yoo