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Yoo Ra Hong began her practice in fiction filmmaking, spinning stories through script and image. While that foundation still holds, her body of work has since expanded beyond the screen. In the making of Ripen until Afterlife (2023), her attention shifted toward the complex interrelationships between people and place. Drawing and painting soon entered her visual repertoire, cracking open a deeper and more specific fascination with human bodily systems and marine life. AGAMI combines these various threads across film, sculpture, and performance.
At its root is AGAMI: Prelude, a docu-fiction piece that introduces a speculative universe where humans have developed gills, their ears crafted by years of aquatic evolution. Here, the familiar begins to haze, the city seems to breathe, and water, so often taken for granted, returns as something fragile, precious, and unevenly shared.
The docu-fiction progresses as a protagonist moving between Hong Kong and Switzerland speaks with Yoo Ra in interview form, their exchange slipping into a wider flow of images and impressions. Everything transitions between documented reality and imagination in a way that renders urban environments far less static. In turn, biological and architectural systems intertwine, informing the manner in which individuals travel, connect, and experience everyday life.
The AGAMI project features collaborators who have recently been tattooed, treating these markings as more-than surface detail. Their tattoos inscribe new spaces on the body as if to manifest as a type of transplantation. Said spaces adopt the quality of altered landscapes, carrying traces of memory and mobility while linking personal narratives with broader environmental concerns such as access to water. In this context, the body becomes a site where social and spatial realities are felt on a distinctly visceral level.
In 2023, Yoo Ra started to introduce tattooed oranges that dried and gathered meaning over time. As they age, they develop a sense of compression, as though AGAMI’s central ideas have been folded into a smaller, more delicate balance between transformation and preservation.
In taking part, Yoo Ra’s collaborators become a part of the work itself, adding layers of definition while forming the lifeblood of the AGAMI universe. Their presence invites audiences to look more considerately at what surrounds them, to ponder upon the way bodies reflect and respond to the systems that sustain them, and to recognize that even the most ordinary sights, sounds, and sensations can disclose profound revelations if only we take the time to notice them.
For inquiries regarding the full version of the work, please contact Yoo Ra via her website
