Haena Yoo’s solo exhibition at Murmurs in Los Angeles, The Oriental Sauce Factory, employed the organic and the mechanical to address the present social strife. Sound and smell, fermentation and fog animated sculptural and kinetic works, linking the microbial to the cosmic and the laborious to the violent, all in the service of an ever-evolving “sauce.” The two-part centerpiece of the show, Bride Machinery and The Milky Way Table, featured meju fermenting in a bath of fluid and pharmaceuticals; the color and odor evolved, and insects sought out the muck. Yoo met with Reuben Merringer at the gallery to talk about what surprises have emerged, the many concepts running through the exhibition, and Yoo’s larger practice.
Haena Yoo, Bride Machinery (details), 2021. Fog machine, timer, DC motor, fermented soybeans, salt water, text from The Savage Mind, wood, metal, clear vinyl, jute twine, tube, blown glass, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
Reuben Merringer: The exhibition involves a lot of unfolding natural processes. I was curious what I’d come back to find four weeks after the opening. Has anything surprised you?
Haena Yoo: You definitely see a huge difference in the liquid that’s been fermenting in The Milky Way Table (all works 2021 except where noted).
RM: Oh my god, it’s a completely different color!
HY: Just two days ago it was this very light brown, but now it looks like soy sauce. If you look from the side, you can see something growing, sort of like a scoby, from the residue of the meju, crushed pills, and vitamins that were inside.
The Oriental Sauce Factory, installation view, Murmurs, Los Angeles, October 24–December 12, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
Haena Yoo, The Milky Way Table (details), 2021. Fermented soybeans, Aspergillus oryzae, salt water, deionized water, glycerin, pepper, dried jujube, magnesium oxide, oregano oil, elderberry, lung health support supplement, Nyquil, Sominex, Benadryl, Aleve, Tylenol, Advil, Cepacol, Midol, Vitamin pill, hand sanitizer, syringe, tube, cast aluminum, plexiglass, and metal, 96 x 70 x 37 in. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
RM: I remember at the opening looking through the glass from below and thinking it looked a lot like a petri dish. The smell is really noticeable now, too. I think about the show you did at AWHRHWAR a few years ago where bees came in, and then at the opening here, there were flies and little bugs…
HY: And ants.
RM: There’s even a spider over there!
HY: [Laughs.]
RM: At the opening you were attending to the factory contraption, Bride Machinery, with the fog machine and the fermenting liquid coming down the funnel, and making sure all of that was functioning properly, as these bugs were coming into the gallery and getting shooed away. Do you see maintenance as being an important part of your work?
HY: To maintain an operative system or sculpture, special machinery, whatever—it’s often behind the scenes, but for me it’s like a performance. Bride Machinery consists of a large funnel that leads down through blown glass elements that look like organs, into a fog machine that sends the vapor into the table. But the majority of my installation is organic: the liquid, the decaying and fermenting material in the table, the meju bricks surrounding the installation. All these things interact with each other. And this includes me, maintaining it like an engineer or bricoleur.
Haena Yoo, The Milky Way Table (detail), 2021. Fermented soybeans, Aspergillus oryzae, salt water, deionized water, glycerin, pepper, dried jujube, magnesium oxide, oregano oil, elderberry, lung health support supplement, Nyquil, Sominex, Benadryl, Aleve, Tylenol, Advil, Cepacol, Midol, Vitamin pill, hand sanitizer, syringe, tube, cast aluminum, plexiglass, and metal, 96 x 70 x 37 in. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
Haena Yoo, The Milky Way Table (details), 2021. Fermented soybeans, Aspergillus oryzae, salt water, deionized water, glycerin, pepper, dried jujube, magnesium oxide, oregano oil, elderberry, lung health support supplement, Nyquil, Sominex, Benadryl, Aleve, Tylenol, Advil, Cepacol, Midol, Vitamin pill, hand sanitizer, syringe, tube, cast aluminum, plexiglass, and metal, 96 x 70 x 37 in. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
RM: When I first walked in, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information. You see all these symbols referring to Amazon and other big tech companies on what look like aluminum chess pieces—the “bachelors” popping up through the glass of The Milky Way Table. There are newspaper clippings in the meju bricks. You have the video of the sauce factory in Korea which fills the gallery with factory noise. And lastly, you reach this small room with the paper gun sculptures dyed with soy sauce, titled I’ve gone to look for America, that are made of clipped newspaper headlines about race-motivated hate crimes against Asian Americans. It’s such a stark image of violence.
HY: The violence of the past couple years really triggered me to do this show. It triggered my emotions—my frustration, desperation, sadness, anger, anxiety, fear. But I questioned if I was even qualified to mention this violence, because I didn’t experience it in person. I was in Seoul, I was relatively safe, but I heard these stories from my friends who were abroad, in New York or Los Angeles—many of them came back because they witnessed this racism firsthand. It was heartbreaking.
Haena Yoo, Meju (The Savage Mind) (detail), 2021. Fermented soybeans, copies of The Savage Mind, printed rice paper, dried roots of white woodland peony, rehmannia, Mongolian milkvetch, Korean angelica, lovage, Chinese cinnamon bark, Chinese licorice, ginger, corn silk, straw, Aspergillus oryzae, Bacillus subtillis, panels 9 x 7 x 1 in., 16 x 5 x 2 in., 8 x 5 x 1½ in.; overall dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
Haena Yoo, Meju (The Savage Mind) (detail), 2021. Fermented soybeans, copies of The Savage Mind, printed rice paper, dried roots of white woodland peony, rehmannia, Mongolian milkvetch, Korean angelica, lovage, Chinese cinnamon bark, Chinese licorice, ginger, corn silk, straw, Aspergillus oryzae, Bacillus subtillis, panels 9 x 7 x 1 in., 16 x 5 x 2 in., 8 x 5 x 1½ in.; overall dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
But it isn’t just about the shootings, but also the violence that’s happening from these massive companies and capitalism throughout history. I suggested the ideology of hate crime, racism, or Western-centrism in different kinds of violence in the show by combining Marcel Duchamp’s sexual story in his piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–1923) and the manual labor of manufacturing sauce. The Bride in my sculpture, as Asian agricultural machinery, is constantly laboring to make vapor, operated by a motor conceived from the desire motor described by Duchamp. Her gesture, originally an orgasm according to Duchamp’s description, is seen in my show as her labor to survive, compelled by the system. Still, the Bachelors perceive her gesture as orgasmic. It is one kind of violence. The oxidation of the cast aluminum totems (The Bachelors) from the vapor is another violence triggered by the Bride. In the meantime, the odor coming from the fermented liquid in the vitrine (The Milky Way Table) has an unfamiliar smell, and people can’t avoid its haunting, kind of violent effect. And finally, the liquid is packaged and displayed in bottles labeled “L’Oriental”: this is the violence of the marketplace.
Haena Yoo, L’Oriental (details), 2021. Glass bottles, Oriental sauce, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
Haena Yoo, Checkmate, 2021. Found cardboard boxes, tape, HD TV, video with sound, 5:30 min. Installation view, The Oriental Sauce Factory, Murmurs, Los Angeles, October 24–December 12, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
RM: So violence is what emerges from whatever it is that the factory is growing, fermenting, and distilling, and it turns into something consumable that directly affects the body.
HY: I see myself as making a kind of operating system with found materials, and all of this organic material and machinery, messiness and accumulation are reflective of society.
RM: Speaking of that, you have all of this sauce now that’s been transforming in the big glass table.
HY: I have to think about what to do after the show. I could bottle it and store it, or dry it fully and just have the residue of this organism, like a fossil that stays in the table. If it goes into bottles, the funny thing—maybe the most important thing—is how to label them. That’s the irony I feel in society, too. I already play with the term “Oriental” in the show title. The liquid can just be rotten or it can be a magical sauce, depending on how I play with the labeling or packaging. That’s what I’m really interested in. Because that’s the way it is in the art market too. It’s a power game, where how things are labeled is really the thing.
The Oriental Sauce Factory, installation view, Murmurs, Los Angeles, October 24–December 12, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
Haena Yoo, I’ve gone to look for America (Pistol II), 2021. Rice paper dyed in soy sauce, 10 x 7 x 1¼ in. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
RM: You shipped the meju bricks from Korea. Seeing Bride Machinery as a factory, and the video of the sauce factory installed in a construction of repurposed shipping boxes, it’s hard not to think about the distribution of objects and how that changes them. Do you see a relationship between transportation and translation in your work?
HY: Yeah. Even I will be different when I have a show in Seoul than when I have one here in LA. Using a different language gives me a different part of my identity or my personality. I kind of see myself as an immigrant, and in Korea my Korean friends sometimes treat me as an Americanized person. [Laughs.] But even to myself, I feel a little bit different when I’m here and when I’m in Seoul. It’s the same as with my work.
RM: In some sense, your personality, your very being, is being translated.
HY: That’s it! I feel very strange. Am I a hypocrite? Am I two different people? On the way here, I was a little bit nervous, and then once I got to the space, I just clicked and changed. That transporting process, in my work and in myself, as an immigrant, is my frustration and delusion. But I kind of enjoy the whole thing. x
Haena Yoo, Checkmate (detail), 2021. Found cardboard boxes, tape, HD TV, video with sound, 5:30 min. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.
Born in South Korea, Haena Yoo works between Los Angeles and Seoul. A 2018 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann emerging artist grant, Yoo has had solo exhibitions at P.BIBEAU, Brooklyn; u’s, Calgary; and La Croix, Pasadena. She participated in a two-person exhibition with Erin Calla Watson at AS IT STANDS, Los Angeles, and a collaborative exhibition with Sterling Wells at AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles. Her work was included in group exhibitions at EPOCH Gallery, Los Angeles; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance; Leroy’s, Los Angeles; and AALA, Los Angeles, among others. She received her MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena and her BFA from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul.
Reuben Merringer is an LA-based artist, writer, and educator. His work explores liminality through the development of novel processes, utilizing the languages of painting, photography, sound, and video. He teaches at ArtCenter College of Design.