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New Exhibition Spotlights Works by Women Artists from MediaSonyo Collective in Korea

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(L to R): Artists Sey Min, Seohyo and Yaloo with Yaloo’s work Roo (2024) at the Libby Leshgold Gallery in September 2024. (Photo by Perrin Grauer)

By Perrin Grauer

Posted on | Updated

Now on view at Libby Leshgold Gallery, Generation that Generates: as above / so below highlights the strength of female artists in emphasizing narrative at the intersection of art and digital technology.

A new exhibition at the Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) showcases the works of three artists from MediaSonyo (미디어소녀), a Korean collective forged in the heart of Seoul’s art and tech community.

Titled Generation that Generates: as above / so below, the show features work by artists and MediaSonyo members Seohyo, Sey Min and Yaloo. Operating since 2023, MediaSonyo has created space for women to work across media by providing networks, knowledge exchange, and communities of support.

“MediaSonyo was established to create an environment where Korean women media artists could receive more recognition,” says Sey Min. “In particular, we wanted to move away from the trend where technology-focused works often appear as mere showcases of advanced technology. Instead, we aim to highlight the strength of female artists in emphasizing narrative.”

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Sey Min with her work Tectonic Movements (2024) at the Libby Leshgold Gallery in September 2024. (Photo by Perrin Grauer)

Yaloo adds that many artists in Seoul’s media arts field have backgrounds in engineering and design.

“Despite this, there’s a significant gap between the two worlds,” she says. “Many of my peers in media art are also active in academic electronic art conferences, design/tech fairs, and audiovisual festivals, which has been eye-opening for me in terms of seeing where else art can go.”

Spring-boarding from this rich creative environment, the works in Generation that Generates explore the intricate relationships between the generation of ideas and generative computational processes.

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Yaloo with her work Roo (2024) at the Libby Leshgold Gallery in September 2024. (Photo by Perrin Grauer)

“The algorithm I’ve created follows simple, consistent rules, generating images that are constantly changing and evolving,” Seohyo says of her 2024 work Shapescape Generator, which appears in the show. “This mirrors the concept of interconnectedness across different levels of reality—how a set of small, controlled decisions within the code can lead to an infinite variety of outcomes, much like how the micro influences the macro, and the individual shapes the collective.”

The exhibition encourages viewers to inhabit their bodies and sense (rather than see) the generation of profound content and ideas in real time and space, using spatial design as a conduit for interpreting data.

“Spatial design plays a crucial role, transforming the digital into something that can be physically navigated and interacted with, blurring the lines between screen and space,” says Yaloo. “I am genuinely curious to see how the community here in Vancouver will perceive and interact with the works.”

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Seohyo with her work Shapescape Generator (2024) at the Libby Leshgold Gallery in September 2024. (Photo by Perrin Grauer)

Generation that Generates: as above / so below runs through Nov. 10 at the Libby Leshgold Gallery at ECU. Gallery hours are noon until 5 pm, seven days a week. Attendance is free and open to the public.

Visit the gallery online to learn more about their exhibitions, resources and programming.


미디어소녀 (MediaSonyo) is a community of women media artists, founded to amplify the social voices of underrepresented groups facing persistent disparities in technology-centric environments. In 2023, MediaSonyo launched its first exhibition at Art Center Nabi, followed by an AI workshop with Korea Arts Management Service. MediaSonyo advocates for an inclusive and open community that transcends geographical, national, and individual boundaries. While it began with women as its focal point, the community strives to become a platform for all beings affected by social inequalities, fostering solidarity and collective action.

Seohyo is an artist and programmer based in Seoul. Her installation and performance works combine everyday objects with media technology to render them unfamiliar, allowing viewers to perceive ordinary things in new ways. Seohyo teaches media literacy education programs with a focus on exploring the possibilities of coding through Creative Computation. During the pandemic, she expanded her daily coding practice to generative art, which began as a way to connect with others online. These works have since been featured on urban billboards at the Korea National Museum of History (Seoul), Kerry Center (Hangzhou), Ten Square (Singapore), Hoog Catharijne (Utrecht), Ebisu Garden (Tokyo), and Incheon International Airport. She has taken part in events such as Demo Festival (2022), D:Art Festival (2022), the Asia Triennial Manchester (2011), the Gwangju Design Biennale (2007), and SIGGRAPH (2006).

Sey Min is a visual media artist who creates digital art using data and AI, to explore new forms of realism through data visualization and AI-generated imagery. Her recent projects have experimented with the content-ification of everyday data through AI. For one project Sey transformed Seoul's daily expenditure data into AI-generated stories that were automatically livestreamed on X. She holds a master's degree from Pratt Institute, and was a researcher at the MIT Senseable City Lab. She has collaborated with SKT, Intel USA, VICE, and Google, and has been featured on TEDx (2011, 2012), CNN Asia, and the MOMA blog. She has exhibited at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Media City Seoul, NeurIPS, ZKM, and Google Art & Culture. She has also taught at Sogang University, directed SeoulLight festival (2019), developed Praxis.ai, and was 10th president of Gyeonggi Content Agency.

Yaloo is a South Korean visual artist working with digital media. She holds a BFA and MFA in video art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yaloo is the recipient of international residencies at Zer01ne and Asia Culture Center (Korea), the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), Western Front (Canada), La Bande Video (Canada), Headlands Art Center (USA), Bemis Studio Art Center (USA), and Pier 2 Art Center (Taiwan). She has participated in numerous exhibitions and screenings around the world. Yaloo was awarded a Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Scholarship by Video Data Bank and won a Gold Prize in visual arts from the AHL Foundation in New York. She was awarded the Gyeonggi MoMA & IBK Young Artists Award and 1st H/ART AveNEW New Media Art competition in 2023. She recently completed a solo exhibition at Gyeonggi Museum of Art (Korea). Yaloo is faculty in the department of Experimental Animation, School of Film/Video, at California Institute of the Arts.

The Libby Leshgold Gallery is a public art gallery dedicated to the presentation of contemporary art. Located within Emily Carr University of Art + Design on Great Northern Way, the gallery serves a broad and varied community that includes the students, faculty and staff of the university, the arts community, the public of Greater Vancouver, and visitors from around the world.

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