City of Gaia

Yaloo

〈Pickled City Dive〉, 2023.

VR, 90 sec.
Courtesy of the artist.

〈Pickled City〉, 2023.

Single-channel video, color, sound, 4 min. 40 sec.
Courtesy of the artist.

Pickled City is one part of a trilogy that explores an underwater worldview, expanding on the artist’s interest in brown algae, a marine plant called miyeok in Korean. It depicts an underwater city deep in the sea, blending scientific knowledge with mythical imagination. The cityscape presented in the work challenges our understanding of a stable city. In this ‘pickled city,’ the distinctions and boundaries between the human and non-human become blurred, and images of unidentifiable life forms, apparently fusions of plants and animals, are entwined with one another. Borrowed from traditional folklore and shamanistic beliefs, such as the imaginary animals illustrated on Baekje Gilt-bronze Incense Burner and the Flower Field of Seocheon from the mythology of Jeju, these images merge with the artist’s interests in miyeok, kelp, and sea slugs (nudibranchs) to create a new city in the unknown territory of the deep sea. The structures woven with iron pipes signify urban buildings or social systems. The connections between two unknown points create lines that in turn create planes, implying that each could potentially extend to create another connection at some point. The artist accentuates the possibility that random entities can intersect to form, collapse, reconstruct a society, and provide an agency of future change.