Yeseul Song
Faculty Fellow
Yeseul Song is a South Korean-born, NYC-based artist and educator who uses technology, interaction, and participation as art media. Her work examines the fluid nature of human perception and its relationship with culture, the environment and the future by creating artwork that challenges how we normally perceive and interact with the world.
While the art world is dominated by visual work, Yeseul’s work uncovers creative possibilities of non-visual senses and creates new sensory languages using technology to advocate imaginative and equitable views of the world. Invisible Sculptures (2018-2021) is a series of non-visual experiential sculptures made of sound, warmth, air, smell, and thought. A book about the series has been published.
She wants her work to be the opposite of shiny, huge, and expensive sculptural objects that overwhelm visitors with their own authority and aura. Instead, she is interested in putting the people who are experiencing her work in the center of the stage to empower them and to challenge the traditional power dynamic between artwork and audience, such as Two Subtle Bodies (2022) and Weather Band (2020). She believes this enables us to think, converse, and imagine our world and future collectively.
With the belief that art needs to be accessible to everyone, she explores and occupies non-traditional public spaces ranging from her own room to streets to challenge commonly held ideas about access and accessibility of art.
Yeseul is an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University Tisch's Interactive Telecommunications Program & Interactive Media Arts (NYU ITP/IMA). She has shared her work with a wide range of arts organizations including Clayarch Museum (South Korea), Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum (D.C., USA), Museum of Arts and Design (NY, USA), Wave Farm (NY), Brooklyn Arts Council (NY), More Art (NY), Art in Odd Places (NY), and PASEO (NM, USA). She’s a recipient of the iF Design Award, and her on-going work has been shortlisted for the Creative Capital Awards 2023. She’s an alum of NYU ITP, New Museum’s New Inc, School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), and Yonsei University.
Project Description
Sustainable Material Workshop is an initiative to research, identify, and adopt sustainable materials to replace acrylic, a material commonly used for digital fabrication despite the harm it causes to the environment. The project aims to reform and innovate the process of art making by examining the environmental impact of materials used in creative projects.