Yeon Ji Yoo: Wish You Were Here
Entering Yeon Ji Yoo’s meticulously crafted world feels like stepping into a vivid yet elusive dream whose beginning you can’t quite recall. In Wish You Were Here, Yoo masterfully balances beauty and unease, drawing us into a surreal yet familiar environment.
Yoo’s installation of paintings and sculptures engages with the increasingly precarious notion of the American Dream. Yoo acknowledges that at its core, it is a dream. In doing so, she offers a fitting metaphor for America itself—a country built on aspiration and ambition, constantly seeking an ideal yet often existing as a fantasy.
In dreams, we experience emotions, memories, and subconscious experiences as fragmented and reassembled, creating a world that is both familiar and disorienting. Yoo’s installation reflects this tension, with reality and imagination blending seamlessly. Rather than offering conventional critiques of opportunity, property, or success often associated with the American Dream, Yoo delves into its emotional and psychological dimensions. She focuses on the sentiment of place, the complexities of memory, and the blurred line between reality and myth.
Drawing inspiration from cinematic landscapes—plains, vast vistas, and wilderness—Yoo creates a scene reminiscent of a television soundstage. She notes that she grew up with “a version of America painted by television”—a world rendered in technicolor. Yoo’s bold, exaggerated colors and contrasts evoke both nostalgia and an unsettling intensity.
Yet Yoo’s installation is far from a two-dimensional TV image. Through her sculptures, multi-layered relief-like paintings, and an immersive environment, she challenges us to confront the idea that the American Dream is a constructed reality—one shaped for us and informed by a longstanding mythology that remains difficult to unravel.
A profound sense of longing permeates Wish You Were Here. Objects, pathways, and vignettes reference journeys, memories, and family histories, underscoring Yoo’s ability to capture the bittersweet nature of connection. The exhibition serves as a poignant reflection on what truly matters as we navigate the complexities of moving on, moving away, and moving forward.
— David Rios Ferreira, curator
Now in the twilight of their lives, my parents are reverting to a mode of foraging, collecting, and hiding away resources for an uncertain future — echoes of their core memories of postwar survival and shifting cultural identities. After immigrating to New York from Korea in the early 1980s, their mantra became “keep everything” as a means of survival and shelter. Our home became a cramped archive of second-hand furniture, moldy clothes from church donation bins, and expired canned goods that my mother diligently stored away for some imagined apocalypse.
This connection to objects—both as remnants of survival and vessels of memory—has shaped my understanding of the world and my creative practice. From the smell of dust of an old drawer filled with secrets to the elusive calligraphic marks of history in black and white photographs, each item holds a story waiting to be remembered and retold. Nostalgia permeates my work as I reflect on the spaces of my childhood, now tinged with the echoes of long-neglected heartaches and generational traumas.
My practice explores these very personal anxieties—particularly the desire to belong to an American heritage while being part of the Korean diaspora. These themes resonate with broader discussions of environmental distress, immigration, the concept of home, and the psychological power of objects as portals to memory, time, and intention.
As a latchkey kid of the 1980s, I learned about America through the lens of television: a technicolor landscape of towering mountains, lush woods, and mischievous critters. I grew up loving the stories of Paul Bunyan and his giant blue ox Babe striding across mountain valleys somewhere in a majestic forest. I prayed fervently to glimpse Sasquatch from a campfire one day. I longed to travel to this version of America, and have visited many of the most beautiful national parks and iconic vistas chasing the dreamlike imagery that shaped my understanding of this American Dream.
Over time, I’ve come to understand that “Technicolor” isn’t the name of a place but a process of creating fiction. American dreams often dissolve into American ghosts as the places they are tied to vanish. Wish You Were Here is a collection of new works where landscape paintings and sculptural elements engage in dialogue to examine the tension between mirage and reality. The works exist in an echo chamber, amplifying questions about perception and memory.
— Yeon Ji Yoo
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yeon Ji Yoo is a mixed-media artist working across drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. Her art explores themes of memory, decomposition, and the reclamation of biological and cultural legacies.
Born in South Korea and raised in New York City, Yoo makes work that reflects the complexities of diaspora and identity as well as the intersection of personal and collective histories.
Yoo holds a BFA from Cooper Union, an MFA from Pratt Institute, and an M.S. in Environmental Science from the College of Staten Island. She lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited at Field Projects, Wave Hill Sunroom Projects, Brooklyn Museum, Pelham Art Center, Rockland Center for the Arts, and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
David Rios Ferreira is a visual artist, independent curator, and the director of the Young Learners program at the Museum of Modern Art, where he develops award-winning programs that nurture the next generation of creative professionals.
Rios Ferreira focuses on curatorial work that amplifies under-represented narratives and provides a platform for voices, stories, and histories often overlooked in mainstream art discourse.
Rios Ferreira has received the Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship from the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, and the 2019 Edom Award for Excellence in Practice from the American Alliance of Museums. In 2020, he was named one of the curators for NYC & Company’s “Virtual NYC Curator Collections” by the New York City. Department of Cultural Affairs.
RELATED EVENTS
March 22, Saturday, 5 p.m. — Opening of Six New Exhibits
May 20, Tuesday, 7 p.m. — Art Talk: Yeon Ji Yoo and David Rios Ferreira
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