artist-in-residence

Bomi Yook

Bomi Yook is a media artist based in Moh’kinstsis / Calgary, working with immersive media, experimental animation, and installation. Her work explores hybridity within identity, cultural landscapes, and knowledge systems, often drawing on the collective memory of the Korean diaspora, with its complex ties to immigration and colonization. Navigating the nuances of belonging to multiple cultural frameworks, Yook’s practice reflects on the paradoxical nature of identity, emphasizing its instability and intersubjectivity.

Exploring the ecologies of Trace—of the Other and Otherness within the self—her works reveal identity and ideologies as inter-constitutive, seeing the world as a paradoxical blend of contexts rather than
distinct, isolated definitions. Through her experimental, interdisciplinary, and process-based approaches to cultural and historical inquiries, Yook’s practice confronts the violence and paradox inherent within identity formation, and its neverending pursuit for self-certainty.

Yook holds an MFA from UCLA and a BFA from Alberta University of the Arts. Her work has shown internationally, including in Los Angeles, Seoul, Toronto, Montreal, Santa Fe, Greece, and Calgary. Her projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Calgary Arts Development. In her ongoing research on Japanese colonization and intergenerational memory, Yook has collaborated with prominent museums, archives, and activist groups, including the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum, Justice Memory Solidarity Foundation, National Museum of Forced Mobilization History, National Foundation for Victims of Forced Mobilization, and the Civic Museum of Japanese Colonial History.

about

K-DIALECTIC

K-DIALECTIC is a multidisciplinary archival project that explores the violent legacy of Japanese colonialism in Korean diasporic memory through a multimedia installation of archival photo-collage and animated documentary fantasy. Rather than treating time as a linear progression, the project approaches history as fractured, cyclical, and shaped by rupture. Grounded in archival materials shared through collaborations with Korean archives, activist
networks, and cultural institutions, the installation reactivates historical materials through a dual-media investigation.

Together, the hanging photo-installation and animation film construct a dialectical portrait of Korean history, where suppressed truths resurface and the ghosts of the oppressed are not passive remnants but active agents of transformation. Their haunting presence resists erasure, compelling a reckoning that reshapes the social order. The silence created by historical violence is reimagined as a site for new forms of collective memory and decolonial agency. Rather than
affirming progress as a linear march toward inevitable improvement, the project shows how the past endures, resurfacing in the present to confront the meanings constructed through historical violence. History is not experienced as steady continuity but as fractured and recurrent, a field of interruptions where suppressed struggles can re-enter and create possibilities for transformation. The project asks how artistic practice can navigate inherited pasts of historical
violence—not by completing the story or offering closure, but by re-engaging what is incomplete, silenced, or lost.