IM Youngzoo’s Brooklyn exhibition turns research into a maze of images, texts, and belief
At Space ZeroOne in Brooklyn, IM Youngzoo’s solo exhibition “The Late” uses video, sculpture, and a sprawling book to ask how ritual survives in an age shaped by virtual reality, NFTs, and AI. On view until July 25, the exhibition brings together 17 works, including a seven-channel video piece and a 1,254-page book that Youngzoo describes as the culmination of 10 years of research and experimentation.
The show opens with a visual disturbance: a woman’s shadow moving across sun-bleached asphalt, her body partly erased by a spray of light that seems to fracture the image around her. That instability is central to Youngzoo’s project. The artist, whose work draws on Korean folk ritual and virtual cemeteries, is less interested in presenting a clear thesis than in tracing how spiritual and technological systems begin to resemble one another.
Inside the gallery, screens are placed so that viewers must move, crouch, and reorient themselves to see the work. Some display separate videos; others are part of “The Late,” the exhibition’s title work. One screen offers “viewing instructions” that shift perspective by assigning different positions to different beings: a Gwisin, a bird, a camera with six eyes, or a human with two. The effect is both playful and unsettling, as if perception itself were being treated as a ritual practice.
The accompanying book extends that logic. It resists linear reading and folds together footnotes, email fragments, dialogue, poems about the Bardo, and histories of apocalyptic movements in Korea. Youngzoo also cites Bruce Sterling’s “Dead Media Theory,” widening the frame to include the afterlives of obsolete technologies. The result is not an academic text in any conventional sense, but something closer to what might be called ficto-research: a form of inquiry protected by poetry.
That ambiguity is part of the work’s force. “The Late” does not resolve the distance between fact and belief, or between scholarship and invention. Instead, it treats disorientation as a condition of contemporary life, where old ritual forms and new media systems both promise orientation while leaving the viewer, at least for a moment, uncertain of where to stand.
A sculptural work, “Orientation” (2025/2026), sharpens that tension. Made from a wooden block with a Go board etched into its top, it offers a quiet counterpoint to the surrounding screens. In Youngzoo’s hands, even stillness feels provisional. ContemporaryArt BrooklynArt VideoArt InstallationArt KoreanArt ArtExhibition
