I Came for the Flowers

I Came for the Flowers
single channel video, square HD, stereo, color, 9’, 2025

I Came for the Flowers, 2025, Installation View
BPA// Exhibition 2025 - A place never fully held, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Kunst Raum Mitte, 2025.
Photo: David von Becker

Starting from a study on female frogs feigning death to avoid mating, I Came for the Flowers traces how generational memories of systemic violence against female bodies linger within women across time. Interlacing the visual aesthetics of 1990-2000s South Korea, archival footage of “comfort women” from the 1940s, and personal intimate recordings, the video reflects on the gendered concept of passivity and reimagines “playing dead” as a dreamlike, suspended state in which resistance manifests not only through confrontation, but through stillness, humor, and the fragile instinct to survive.

Sources:
Frog Experiment (2023)
Drop dead! Female mate avoidance in an explosively breeding frog. R. Soc. Open Sci. 10: 230742.
Carolin Dittrich and Mark-Oliver Rödel
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230742
Humboldt University, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany

A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems (2018)
Book by Emily Jungmin Yoon
Ecco/HarperCollins, New York, USA

Archive Footage (1945, 1991)
War & Women's Human Rights Museum, Seoul, South Korea

I Came for the Flowers, still, 2025

I Came for the Flowers, 2025, Installation View
Vision and perspecive, Busan Museum of Art x Today Art Museum, Beijing, China, 2026.
Photo: Studio Jeongbiso

I Drank a Magic Potion, but I Didn’t Die: Kim Bok-Dong
single channel video, sound, colour, 7', 2026

Her second film, I Drank a Magic Potion, but I Didn’t Die: Kim Bok-Dong (2026) establishes a dialogue with the archive of the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul, foregrounding the testimony of Kim Bok-Dong, as a form of intergenerational care and responsibility. Yoo invites us to reflect on the violence endured by the so-called ‘comfort women’ and to engage with them instead as ‘grandmothers’, opening space for new vocabularies and alternative forms of affection and empathy. —MN

I Drank a Magic Potion commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Co-produced by Hana Yoo and HKW 2026

I Came for the Flowers(2025) and I Drank a Magic Potion, but I Didn’t Die: Kim Bok-Dong(2026), Installation View
Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations
HKW Berlin, Germany, 2026.
Photo: Hanna Wiedemann / HKW

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