EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
A young Yu
Lunchtime Studio Visit with A young Yu & Nicholas Oh
Through performance-based film, I reimagine precolonial Korean folk and spiritual practices to reflect contemporary diasporic perspectives. Passed on generationally, these practices connect me to my family and to a land whose absence I feel palpably. However, I am not faithful to historical canon. My work aims to transgress older traditions, regenerating them within new contexts.
My films document performances which distill movements from ancestral rituals that evoke care, intimacy, and the sublime; from this, I develop new choreographies that embody personal and communal experiences. In the past, I have performed funerary rites and created adaptations of folk dance at disfigured wartime buildings and abandoned rice fields in the Korean Demilitarized Zone; buried moon-jar shaped urns at American national parks in the midst of the 2020 lockdown; dwelled, watered and unearthed my body en tandem beneath ancient swamps. Performances activate spaces ranging from personal shrines to historical sites of ongoing geopolitical conflict through gestures that meditate on belonging, sexuality, trauma, and migration.
Using the language of my heritage, I construct new narratives. I appropriate visual cues and materials from my upbringing to speak about loss and renewal of hope. I question my role in continuing to pass on history and culture and look to transformative methods of disruption.
A young Yu (b. 1990) is a Korean-American artist based in New York. She has exhibited at venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Christie’s Inc., New York; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; Artist Alliance, New York; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; LeRoy Neiman Gallery, New York; Time Square Space, New York; Jewish Museum, New York.
Ayoung was awarded the Artist In the Market (AIM) Fellowship by the Bronx Museum of Arts, the Individual Artist Fellowship by the MidAtlantic Foundation of Arts, the Gold Prize by the AHL Foundation, and the Artist Session by Recess Gallery. She has also participated in artists residencies at Sculpture Space, New York; Dongguk University, South Korea; School of Visual Arts, New York; Catwalk Art Institute, New York.
