BIO ʕ•ﻌ•ʔ

Yuna Ko lives and works in Queens, NY and is a member of the collective Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR). Her work reclaims the visual language living in the Asian diasporic experience as a means of imagining and speculation. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2025 and BFA from Cornell University in 2013. Selected exhibitions include: “What’s carried through the wind”, AHL Foundation, New York, NY; “Everything is Recorded”, Wallach Gallery, New York, NY; “39 Footnotes”, Accent Sisters, New York, NY; “Steep, Alter, Ritual”, Roski Graduate Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “Gathering”, Five Myles, Brooklyn, NY; “Late Night Enterprise”, Perrotin, New York, NY; and “Bathing in Public”, Selenas Mountain, Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in Apogee Journal, Artforum, FAR–NEAR, Gallery Gurls, Hyperallergic, JoySauce, Li Tang and The Washington Post among others. She has participated in programs at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), GYOPO (LA), Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), CHAT/Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong), among others.

STATEMENT (つ˵•́ω•̀˵)つ━☆ﾟ.*･

New Jeans begins their song “Hurt” yearning for a message from someone they care for. When you are diasporic, distance and time amplify this sentiment, as absence becomes a condition of everyday life. Spanning installation, research and pedagogy, my work attempts to demarcate an aesthetic lexicon from the Korean diasporic experience of home. This involves examining geographic, temporal, and sociocultural convergences that fill the gaps left by displacement.

Taking a multivocal approach, I explore archives, social media, and popular culture alongside stories from family and friends. I carry out field research collectively at sites tied to “home” including Asian enclave neighborhoods, ritual sites in the “motherland”, and resonant sites in nations with overlapping histories. Through this process, I uncover symbolic and visual connections across the migrant Asian diaspora. My work becomes a lexicon of amalgamated rituals, imported cultural artifacts, generational practices, and mutating traditions.

The work takes the form of co-study, collaborative research and discussion, and installations recontextualizing and remaking research materials( including found objects, images, archival records, etc). Through the setting of home, I aim to capture a shared intimate visual glossary and unearth invisible interconnections spanning the personal to geopolitical within the domestic site. I am interested in the dualities of the home: accumulation and emptiness as both presence and absence, ghosts and spirits alongside the living, and shared yet deeply personal experiences. Ultimately, I aim to reclaim the living language of the diasporic experience as a site of imagining and to speculate on what can be learned from the richness present in persistent everyday practices.