What hyperlinks canines and dance? The work of Im Youngzoo considers that query. The South Korean artist has been named because the recipient of the 2025 Frieze Seoul Artist Award. Supported by Bvlgari for the third 12 months, the award is a chance for a South Korea-based artist to appreciate a brand new fee at a pivotal second of their profession. The brand new work shall be introduced at Frieze Seoul, which returns to COEX, 3 – 6 September 2025.
Im’s successful fee, Calming Sign, shall be a three-channel video set up that responds to this 12 months’s theme of ‘Future Commons’ – additionally the theme of the 2025 Frieze London Artist Award – to discover concepts of commonality and group.
The time period ‘calming alerts’ was coined by Norwegian canine ethologist Turid Rugaas to explain sure instinctual, repetitive behavioural patterns exhibited by canines to de-escalate or keep away from aggressive encounters. The calming alerts that canines use – reminiscent of turning the top, licking the nostril and lips, and mendacity down – look like a product of the animals’ human domestication, since their genetic kin within the wild, reminiscent of wolves, don’t show them in the identical method.
Im’s fee will use the idea of ‘calming alerts’ to discover how recurrent discovered gestures and behaviours seem in human society in occasions of collective unease. Linking the rotations present in dances and different devotional and cultural practices to the earth’s spinning on its titled axis, the moving-image work will join completely different types of imbalance as visible manifestations of hysteria, as humanity faces an unsure future.
Talking in 2024, Im defined, ‘I’m inquisitive about what individuals can not see however think about, how they create sure topics and imagine in them, and the way they understand sure issues to be notably stunning.’
About Im Youngzoo
Im Youngzoo (b. 1982) explores the intersection of private narratives and collective histories, religious frameworks and scientific modes of considering. Throughout video, set up, efficiency and digital actuality, her follow blurs boundaries between actuality and fiction. Im contrasts the needs embodied by fashionable science and know-how with the persistence of irrational beliefs in on a regular basis life. Im has been shortlisted for the 2025 Korea Artist Prize and has beforehand exhibited at Seoul’s Perigee Corridor & Gallery (2024) and Outsight (2021), and Doosan Gallery in New York (2019) and Seoul (2018), amongst others.
Watch a video with Goen Choi, winner of the 2024 Frieze Seoul Artist Award
Essential picture: Im Youngzoo, Calming Sign(이탤릭), 2023/2025. Three-channel video set up. Idea picture. Courtesy: the artist
