SOON-MI YOO


Assistant Professor/Visiting Artist

Film
Department of Transmedia

syoo03@syr.edu


Education:
M.F.A. Massachusetts College of Art

Office: Shaffer Art Building Rm.116
Telephone: 315-443-8537

Biography:

Soon-Mi Yoo’s film and video work have been screened at the Viet Art Centre (Hanoi, Vietnam), the ARKO Art Center (Seoul, Korea), the London Film Festival (UK), the Images Festival (Toronto, Canada), Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany), Rotterdam Film Festival (The Netherlands), the New York Film Festival, San Francisco Cinémathèque, Pacific Film Archive, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Flaherty Seminar, Academie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany), Seattle International Film Festival, Hawaii International Film Festival among others.

Her most recent work, Dangerous Supplement, which deals with the landscape of the past, in particular during the Korean War, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2006. Isahn explores issues of displacement andpremiered at the Lincoln Center, New York Film Festival, “Views from the Avant-Garde” in 2005. Ssitkim: talking to the dead, which examines the legacy of mass civilian killings committed by the Korean forces during the Vietnam War, premiered also at the Lincoln Center, New York Video Festival in 2005. Both Isahn and ssitkim are featured at Cinema du Reel Film Festival at the George Pompidou Center (Paris, France) in 2008.

In addition to film and video, Yoo has exhibited photographs and gallery installations at the San Diego Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, The International Center of Photography, Boston Center for the Arts among others. Her photographs of the Comfort Women (victims of sexual slavery in the Japanese “rape camps” during WW II) survivors are published in “Comfort Women Speak: Testimony from Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military ” in 2000.

She is a recipient of Rockefeller Foundation’s Media Arts Fellowship (2006), residency fellowship from the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2004), the MacDowell Colony (2001), the Corporation of Yaddo (2000), fellowship from the American Photography Institute (1999), and the National Asian American Telecommunications Association Grant (1994).

 
Artist Statement
 
My work explores intricate relationship between personal experience and history. In my films, history is not a definitive narrative but a collection of memories told to rehabilitate historical imagination and experience. Taking a lesson from the fact that history is full of tension between the evidence of what is seen and what is understood, I work this tension into the visual and audio elements of my film. By crossing the boundary between documentary, personal essay, and experimental film categories, I seek to disorder the standard narratives of history and to produce an alternative telling. Through uneasy juxtaposition of fragments, the layers of memory reach for the power of feeling. It opens up a space of imagination where it is possible to make connections between personal experience and public memory, historical perspective and private suffering.