09/06/2024
Self Love Club | Haena Yoo | Opening: September 14th, 6-9pm | Murmurs, 1411 Newton St. Los Angeles | MFA Alum
Self Love — “Love Yourself”
It’s an undeniably great phrase. Regardless of time, place, or culture, numerous people from religious figures and philosophers to “pop stars” those who are so called “the greatest” have all preached the virtues of self-love. Like Laozi’s words “Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts one,” continuous emphasis on the importance of self-love has established it as the ideal “lifestyle” nowadays, with well-being, a healthy routine of caring for both body and mind, as its foundation. Get ready with me to go to yoga: Light up a stick of Nag Champa incense, a head-to-toe Lululemon fit, and learn asanas from an app that costs $6.99 a month on your smartphone, then washing hair with an aromatherapy shampoo, and applying an anti-aging cream infused with ginseng extract. A pricey smoothie made with 12 ingredients, including protein and collagen might be able to make your day slightly more special. Isn’t it familiar? Pretty sure, we all do it.
In this exhibition, Haena Yoo, who has been observing how distorted histories in everyday micro consumption lubricate capitalism through her father’s soy sauce factory and her mother’s cosmetics, turns her attention to her sister’s interest in yoga and pilates, focusing on the self-care industry and culture.
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
