Haena Yoo
L’ORIENTAL (AUTHENTIC ORIENTAL), 2021 (left bottle)
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Glass bottle, syringe, Nyquil, Sominex, Benadryl, Tylenol, Midol, vitamin pill, Chinese cinnamon bark, ginger, cornsilk, woodland peony, and filtered oriental sauce
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11 x 3.5 x 3.5 inches
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Courtesy the artist and Murmurs Gallery, Los Angeles
L’ORIENTAL (SPICY ORIENTAL), 2021 (right bottle)
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Glass bottle, syringe, Nyquil, Sominex, Benadryl, Tylenol, Midol, vitamin pill, Chinese cinnamon bark, ginger, cornsilk, woodland peony, and filtered oriental sauce
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12.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 inches
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Courtesy the artist and Murmurs Gallery, Los Angeles
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About the work
The liquid (sauce) in the glass bottles is my own panacea made through fermentation, following the traditional way of brewing Asian medicine. It is mixed with herbal organic ingredients, flu pills, and health supplements purchased from America drug store, and filtered, packaged into the bottles. They are actual outcomes of my installation project entitled The Oriental Sauce Factory in 2021. The negotiation over a natural embodiment of fermentation is controlled through packaging, marketing and distribution, and finally given the cultural construction of “Oriental Sauce” for ease of market classification. They are labelled with the Le’Oriental, a French perfume brand line, and are displayed to be recognized for its value. This idea reorders a use value from ancient agricultural methods in an absurd way, by dissolving contemporary health products. I conceive of an update largely dependent on control over the other for profit through a mechanized vision of a contemporary world.
-Haena Yoo
About the artist
HAENA YOO is a multidisciplinary artist who works between Seoul and Los Angeles. Yoo makes installations constructed with found materials, video, sound, and smell, exploring themes of labor, identity, and global capitalism. Through a tinkering process, she uses materials borrowed from different minority cultures, making operative systems that symbolize social interactions and power structures resulting from neo-globalization. Her work often shows the urgency created by limiting materials to what is at hand, showing the archeological and socio-political status of the maker.
Yoo has had solo exhibitions and projects at Murmurs, Los Angeles (2021); P.bibeau, New York City (2021); u’s, Calgary (2020) among others, and she presented a collaborative exhibition with Erin Carla Watson at As It Stands (2019); Sterling Wells at AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles (2018). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Other Places Art Fair, San Pedro (2019); Torrance Art Museum, Torrance (2018); Leroy’s, Los Angeles (2018); AALA, Los Angeles (2018). She is a recipient of a 2018 Emerging Artist Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation.
Haena Yoo
