The Brooklyn Rail

Go is an ancient Chinese game whose deceptively simple design of circular tokens on a gridded wooden board obfuscates a near-infinite set of possible movements and strategies. In go, players compete to occupy territory by placing black or white tokens on the points where the board’s gridlines intersect, as opposed to the grid’s squares themselves. The pieces creep across the board, at times multiplying and at others disappearing entirely, but throughout they occupy a space outside our tangible plane of existence.

Multi-media contemporary artist IM Youngzoo’s 方術: Orientation (방술)(2026) skewers the tension between the corporeal and the metaphysical that is inherent to go. The sculpture’s base is a go board with a powerful magnet hidden beneath it, repelling and suspending a compass. The compass’s needle, its operation distorted by the magnet’s pull, follows the direction of the compass as it spins uselessly in midair, suggesting a dimension outside the spatial and gravitational conventions that govern existence on earth. This dimension is likely the “Displaced Outside (外界)”, a term Youngzoo uses to define “the world outside Earth—and more broadly, what is external to the body one inhabits,” suggesting the transference or expansion of consciousness as another frontier.

Orientation is featured in Youngzoo’s solo show The Late 故 [go], whose title combines English and Chinese designations for the deceased, who also occupy the aforementioned Displaced Outside. The Late 故, now on view at Space ZeroOne, presents a challenging yet compelling cosmology and commentary that balances sensory derangement with quiet reflection. The show is equal parts exhibition and library, comprising multi-channel videos, sculptures, and a book 1,254 pages long also titled The Late 故 (the forward instructs the viewer to eschew reading it from cover to cover), whose disparate narratives, extensive footnotes, and three-part glossary contextualizes explains and expands upon the exhibition’s imagery.

The show is composed primarily of multi-channel film installations transposed across projector screens, many of which allude to characters and scenarios built into The Late book, including a woman transforming into a bird and a nonbinary character baring a knife while lying on the floor. Most of Youngzoo’s work addresses a dialectic between East Asian religions (including Buddhism and Korean shamanism) and immersive technology (particularly augmented reality and the Metaverse), highlighting how both entail hallucinatory out-of-body experiences and socialization within an intangible space.

For instance, three of Youngzoo’s film installations (collectively known as “Life Review [주마등 走馬燈]”) are staged within a sculptural gamyo [empty grave] in Korean funerary practices, through which the viewer crawls, staring alternately at wall- and ceiling-mounted screens that suggest television sets and virtual reality headpieces. These films feature abstract montages of scientific stock footage, POV walks through gravesites, and retro CGI, seemingly disparate imagery meant to simulate the life of the deceased person whose grave the visitor inhabits flashing before the visitor’s eyes. Another work, Today-Tomorrow (오늘 내일) (2026), functions as a wall dividing the galleries, but it includes an eyehole through which the visitor can view a stylized CGI rendering of a Buddha statue through someone else’s gaze. The camera swings from a birds-eye view of the top of Buddha’s head to dip into the statue’s hollowed body, signifying the visitor’s projection from themselves into another person through the Displaced Outside. Again, the visitor is invited to embody another person’s life in the present and after their passing.

The Late 故 also embodies the paradoxically isolating effects of the algorithmic internet, in which the almost utopian idea of global connection is realized as homogenized, exhausting slop. For instance, in Waiting M (웨이팅 M) (2021), the third installation in her gamyo grave installation, Youngzoo repositions the COVID-19 pandemic against the backdrop of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, drawing parallels between our contemporary plague and the Black Death of The Decameron by cloaking them in Y2K-era digital grunge. Youngzoo’s inclusion of a bell’s toll throughout the film is also echoed in one of her sculptures, Wherefore (하이고 何以故) (2025), in which Youngzoo appropriates yoryeong ritual bells whose ringing signifies a transference into the Displaced Outside by “mediat[ing] between the divine and human realms.” In Waiting M (웨이팅 M), the yoryeong’s sound transforms into knells, recalling the pandemic’s morbid pervasiveness and the layers of apathy we have built around ourselves to justify living in spite of it. 

The Late’s 故 curator Hayoung Chung has described the game go as a “micro-universe,” and the same can easily be said of IM Youngzoo’s artistic practice. Indeed, The Late 故 is an exhibition of awe-inspiring ambition, achieving a complexity and scale of worldbuilding I have yet to see in any other contemporary art exhibition this decade. Approaching The Late 故, both as a viewer and probably as a curator, is like approaching a millennia-old epic poem, codex, or atlas, where every detail contains a form of perception-altering wisdom. 

One entry in the lengthy book included in the exhibition, for instance, summarizes The Late 故 while more broadly encapsulating the learned helplessness and fatigue endemic to the 2020s. Here, Youngzoo frames the word “failure,” which she had previously applied to death, incorrect predictions, and general blunders, as follows: “By failing in the apocalypse and failing to escape, these failures ironically induce a sense of boredom in moments of crises. It is the power that enables out-of-body experience and time deferral.” Buried on page 1,248 of the text, one star in her many constellations of worldbuilding, Youngzoo’s conceptualization of failure perfectly captures the root of our addled post-pandemic, post-algorithm psyches, continuously suspended between dread and denial, every day driven further and further away from physicality and tangible planes of existence as we knew them.