Where Dogs, Humans, and Futures Touch
At the collision of scientific behavior and spiritual belief, somewhere between the soft bark of instinct and the sterile glow of future-facing technologies, you’ll find Im Youngzoo. Winner of the 2025 Frieze Seoul Artist Award, Im is not merely a contemporary Korean artist—she’s a cartographer of our psychic geography, drawing elegant, glitchy borders between the rational and the irrational, between personal trauma and collective longing.
This year, Frieze Seoul—set to unfurl its curated chaos across the COEX Convention Center this September—will feature Calming Signal (2023/25), Im’s quietly provocative three-channel video installation. Here, within the gridded scaffold of structure and chance, we’re invited into a space of eerie symmetry: dogs licking each other’s snouts, humans performing rituals of comfort, all under the looming spell of a world both falling apart and trying to console itself.
Instinct, Domestication, and the Future Commons
Im’s Calming Signal belongs to a lineage of artworks that don’t preach, but murmur. Inspired by the subconscious gestures dogs use to soothe packmates—something scientists and dog-lovers alike call “calming signals”—the piece floats in the uncanny valley between learned behavior and inherited memory.
Translated into the human sphere, these gestures become even stranger. Our consolations—scrolling, sharing, praying, lying next to someone while staring at separate screens—feel half natural, half programmed. Im places them side by side, not to moralize but to observe. The dogs are not metaphors; they are mirrors.
“Future Commons,” the fair’s chosen theme, is a chewy one: a provocation, a dare, and a hope. Im’s response does not offer solutions but frameworks. Her calm is not passive. It asks: what do we do, instinctively, when we’re overwhelmed by the future?
Rituals of Collapse and Connection
Born in 1982 in Busan, Im Youngzoo has steadily built a practice defined by restlessness and risk. She’s worked across video, installation, performance, and virtual reality, always skimming the blurry divide between lived belief and empirical knowledge. Her themes—death, apocalypse, outer space—are not science fiction as much as emotional cartographies.
She speaks in the language of proximity: between body and screen, history and intimacy, superstition and sense. Her 2019 solo show at Doosan Gallery in New York hinted at this convergence, while her recent 2024 presentation at Perigee Hall & Gallery in Seoul confirmed her trajectory toward deeper, denser inquiries.
Being shortlisted for the 2025 Korea Artist Prize only solidifies what Frieze has now officially recognized: Im is one of the most compelling minds working in Korea’s contemporary art scene today.
Community as Condition, Not Ideal
The three-channel structure of Calming Signal—cool, diagrammatic, almost architectural—reminds us that grids don’t only imprison. They organize. They hold things together. Like communities. Like algorithms. Like memories.
Yet within that grid is something gloriously ungridded: the twitch of an ear, the repetition of a twitchy ritual, a sigh in a space too vast to control. Im’s project reframes community not as utopia but as behavior. Something messy, instinctual, broken, and yet—somehow—reassuring.
Her vision of the commons is less about what we share than how we share: in breath, in fear, in unconscious reflex. This is where the future begins—not with certainty, but with signal.