With a PhD in feminist/queer geography, Youngsook’s socially engaged practice is often site-specific and explores intimate aesthetics of solidarity. Taking on ecological grief as life dedication and developing eco-literacy for interspecies solace in active witnessing, her practice instigates collective grief as climate interrogation scrutinising structural conditions that intersect human tragedy and environmental loss. In Every Bite of the Emperor (since 2021), the ongoing body of works on colonial exploitation through transnational narratives between North England post-mining towns, Malaysian rainforest and Vietnamese coastal region; The Book of Loss (since 2022), intervention performance for commemorating seven lost glaciers; Slow Sips with Earth (since 2023), tea-mixing as a grief literacy of writing a collective prayer for peri-menopausal Earth, are in tandem with this inquiry. With an emphasis on collective reimagination, Youngsook founded the transnational eco-grief council Foreshadowing and co-founded the practice-based research collective Decolonising Botany.
www.youngsookchoi.com
@young.sook.choi