A recent exhibition suggests that our drive to develop new technologies indicates a spiritual need to manage ‘existential uncertainty’
This dense, heady show by Seoul-based artist Im Youngzoo is anchored by an hour-long, seven-channel video installation. Dispersed throughout the first gallery (of two), including a triptych of screens looming overhead and on a tombstone-like vertical monitor, The Late 故 (2025–26) follows scattered acts – a figure in a white Ghillie suit romping around in the snow, a woman receiving acupuncture on the crown of her head, a self-driving car navigating country roads, people visiting the cemetery – that sum up to what could be called, per one set of intertitles, a ‘survival report’, ‘a final witness’. While the seemingly disconnected scenes progress, typed texts scroll by. They include emails, weather updates, hypnosis prompts, stray thoughts about death and, in particular, questions about those who play dead.
A survival tactic shared by animals, as well as, the onscreen text points out, human organs (as in the case of hypometabolism) and machines (such as when a computer ‘halts its operation’ instead of opting for a ‘faulty execution’), playing dead is something visitors to Im’s exhibition can test out for themselves. In the centre of the first gallery is a long, stony grey platform. On it lies what appears to be a foil-covered corpse in a VR headset (The Late VR, 2025–26). But the platform also offers a niche for the not-yet-dead: to watch Im’s single-channel video One Hundred Meeting Point (2025–26), you withdraw into this single-occupancy alcove and stretch out on your back. A monitor on the ceiling inside plays animations starring an acupuncture dummy and a Buddha statue, with spooky footage of someone with a flashlight approaching you on a dark road. Other videos installed in cubicles on either end of the platform – such as Waiting M (2021), which collages, among other curiosities, footage from Mars with meditations on Soviet scientist Alexander Chizhevsky’s theories linking solar cycles to financial crises and political revolutions – invite viewers to kneel like mourners.
As a whole, the show suggests that the applied sciences – pseudo and otherwise – and humankind’s drive to develop new technologies – for image capture, remote sensing, creating virtual realities and so on – arise out of a spiritual need to manage what the exhibition handout calls ‘existential uncertainty’. For nations, this angst might manifest as a technological arms race, and Im hints at ways in which governments, like South Korea’s starting in the latter half of the twentieth century, fuelled various tech frenzies, with mixed results. In the second gallery, whose walls are bathed in antiseptic yellow-green light, copies of a 1,254-page artist book, also titled The Late 故 – are displayed on a wooden platform. Here, Im writes, for instance, that when Korean president Lee Myung-bak proposed his ‘747 Plan’ during his 2007 campaign – a plan to increase the country’s GDP and per capita income, and transform it into the seventh largest economy in the world – ‘VR was tapped as a core technology in the strategy’. ‘The Ministry of Science and Technology announced an investment of one trillion won to “take the first place in the global VR market by 2015,”’ Im writes. ‘But with the Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in September 2008, the global financial crisis annulled all such ambitions.’ In view of this, The Late VR increasingly resembles not a wake for a headset-addicted human but a requiem for technological progress itself.
Then again, our devices don’t really die, even when they’ve outlived their potential. Opposite the platform in the second gallery stands A Dark Room (2025–26), three broken vertical monitors, and a further functioning one, mounted side by side like panels of a folding screen. Those that are switched on display haunting images, like the skirt and feet of a floating woman. Others offer nothing, until one notices the words of caution – ‘Beware of ghosts’, ‘Beware of science’ – smudged in Korean on their mirror-smooth surfaces. Maybe, Im’s clues suggest, some technologies are simply playing dead – withdrawing from us, transforming from coveted tools into vessels for our fears and longings, objects we in turn revere and contemplate.
Im Youngzoo: The Late 故 is on view at Space ZeroOne, New York though 25 July
From the Summer 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
