yoona
yoona (b. 2002) is a cyberfeminist multimedia artist based in dallas, texas. her academic and artistic practice exists in the liminal space between cyberspace and the offline world—a framework through which to remediate and recontexualize her lived experiences and the ever-shifting contexts of her queer korean american identity. yoona experiments with code, the body, and alternative modes of performance as mediums for autoethnographic storytelling and poetic worldbuilding. she is also a dj, facilitator of a fashion theory book club, and zine-maker—amongst other things.
이곳은 ___ 이런 의미였어
이곳은 ___ 이런 의미였어 [translated as 'this place ___ meant'] is a browser-based piece
of hypertext literature responding to the theme of passages...
... hyperlinks as passages
... the body as a passage
... passages as a liminal space, a body itself, a body between.
the artist explores her being as a passage and ancestral (re)birthsite — birth as not
simply a process of spawning onto the earth but of one that the artist feels is the act of
becoming living proof of 고생, her ancestors’ selfless sacrifices, and the turmoil that
transpired in their lives as a consequence of geopolitical forces beyond their control.
simultaneously autobiographical and speculative,이곳은 ___ 이런 의미였어 exists as a
collective memory of the artist’s own diasporic experiences interwoven with anecdotes
about her grandmothers to unearth the intergenerational correlation between land, place,
and womanhood. the work ultimately is a reflection on how the artist’s korean american identity renders the existence of her body as a passage — one imbued in colonial and
imperial relations, remnants of war, of a motherland split in half, and of diasporic
dysphoria.
technical details include the ability to hover over words written in hangul for the english
translation, however, not all words are translated as to represent the artist’s personal
relationship to her native language. the absence of back buttons is intentional; to go back
to the beginning, restart the webpage. the piece is best viewed on a computer. 이곳은
___ 이런 의미였어 is also an ongoing project that is currently in its development stages.
view the work