Haena Yoo creates a series of performative installations that bring together both material and immaterial substances, including discarded objects, videos, sounds, food, fermentation, and smells. She explores the causes of anxiety and desire that arise in capitalist/consumerist societies and is interested in the ambivalent emotions felt by consumers and modern individuals. She also questions the power and sustainability of systems and regulations that both promise hope to consumers and control them, examining concepts such as labor, capital, modernism, performance, and processes to investigate structures that are not always easily visible or explicit under specific conditions.
In this context, Haena Yoo incorporates the unique indigenous characteristics of South Korean capitalism/consumerism, intertwined with the country's history from the miracle on the Han River to the IMF crisis, into her artwork as a different way to challenge its identity. She has an interest in the hybrid determinants of culture, politics, and society that occur in the passage of time and space.
The "L'Oriental" is a series of bottles with the label "Oriental," imagining consumer goods that could be commercialized with this label, such as salad dressing, perfume, soap, tea, and more. These consumeristic products are created by placing the desired totems of contemporary Asians, or those they wish to possess, inside bottles of alcohol, which are then blended with herbs symbolizing resilience. This series of bottles embodies a temporality, creating a unique blend of alcohol with symbolic herbs like mugwort, reflecting the desires of modern Asians.