Caroline Yoo

Caroline Yoo is an interdisciplinary artist who was born and raised in the United States to Korean immigrants. Through her art practice of performance, social practice, intimate gatherings, and video installations, Yoo uses translation as a tool to map forgotten histories–to reveal psychological shadows haunting the diaspora–and perform contemporary translations of rituals for the living. She is a co-founder and leader of JADED PGH, Hwa Records, and Han Diaspora Group, artist collectives focused on the Asian diaspora experience.

Yoo graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2023. She has performed, exhibited, and produced at Carnegie Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; University of Michigan Ann Arbor; McDonough Museum of Art; University of Southern California; LA Art Show; Kelly Strayhorn Theater and more.

Tracing the edges of hidden and silenced perspectives of the past to inform the personal and political of the present, Yoo visualizes narratives using multiple voices in tension with each other to highlight the complicated structures of empire and power unraveling imperial illusions through geopolitical poetry.

In her social practice, Caroline strives for radical existence through the acknowledgment of space, time, labor, mentors, and peers as building blocks needed to envision place and space as alternative learning models for kinship, debates, manifesting resistive art, dreaming wild, processing unheard traumas, or plant grounds for new futures.

What do you hope to accomplish in the Distillery Residency?

My most recent works have all been about ghost-hunting for the forgotten women, the women who desired to dream, the women who were too loud, the women that rebelled in Korean and Korean diaspora history. Continuing with the themes of hunting through discarded archives—personal and political—to transmute violent female mythologies, family history, and re-perform voices of the past to engage in a more feminist present and future, I am currently researching the first Korean American born in Hawaii in 1903; her name: Alice Hyun.

Using the public archives of Alice’s family, tracing her existence in the US military working as a linguist during World War II and her later believed alliance with the North Korean government, I am creating a new video installation based on performance, that will explore the complicated nature of nationalism, land, and empire in the Korean-American diaspora.

I am also excited to sit down with my new footage from my visit to a contemporary shrine for an ancient forgotten goddess called MAGO, located in South Korea. All the footage is taken on my infrared camera as I further my research of performing my body with violent technology as a method to engage and resist with the politics of visibility and the relationship of the body to the surveillance states we live in.

Where can we see your work?

To find out more about Caroline and to see more of her work, check out:

Website: www.carolineyoo.com
Instagram: @cyoophotography

Hwa Records: @hwarecords
JADED PGH: @jadedpgh

Caroline will also have a solo exhibition of new work at Bunker Projects, from Jan 5 – Feb 16, 2024, where she will be exhibiting her new work about Alice Hyun and Alice in Wonderland.