Dogs, Dervishes, Dendrochronology: Im Youngzoo Wins the Frieze Seoul Artist Award

What links dogs and dance? The work of Im Youngzoo considers that question. The South Korean artist has been named as the recipient of the 2025 Frieze Seoul Artist Award. Supported by Bvlgari for the third year, the award is an opportunity for a South Korea-based artist to realize a new commission at a pivotal moment in their career. The new work will be presented at Frieze Seoul, which returns to COEX, 3 – 6 September 2025.

Im’s winning commission, Calming Signal, will be a three-channel video installation that responds to this year’s theme of ‘Future Commons’ – also the theme of the 2025 Frieze London Artist Award – to explore ideas of commonality and community.

The term ‘calming signals’ was coined by Norwegian canine ethologist Turid Rugaas to describe certain instinctual, repetitive behavioural patterns exhibited by dogs to de-escalate or avoid aggressive encounters. The calming signals that dogs use – such as turning the head, licking the nose and lips, and lying down – appear to be a product  of the animals’ human domestication, since their genetic relatives in the wild, such as wolves, do not display them in the same way. 

Im’s commission will use the concept of ‘calming signals’ to explore how recurrent learned gestures and behaviours appear in human society in times of collective unease. Linking the rotations found in dances and other devotional and cultural practices to the earth’s spinning on its titled axis, the moving-image work will connect different forms of imbalance as visual manifestations of anxiety, as humanity faces an uncertain future.

Speaking in 2024, Im explained, ‘I am interested in what people cannot see but imagine, how they create certain subjects and believe in them, and how they perceive certain things to be particularly beautiful.’

About Im Youngzoo

Im Youngzoo (b. 1982) explores the intersection of personal narratives and collective histories, spiritual frameworks and scientific modes of thinking. Across video, installation, performance and virtual reality, her practice blurs boundaries between reality and fiction. Im contrasts the desires embodied by modern science and technology with the persistence of irrational beliefs in everyday life. Im has been shortlisted for the 2025 Korea Artist Prize and has previously exhibited at Seoul’s Perigee Hall & Gallery (2024) and Outsight (2021), and Doosan Gallery in New York (2019) and Seoul (2018), among others. 

Watch a video with Goen Choi, winner of the 2024 Frieze Seoul Artist Award

^{Main image: Im Youngzoo, Calming Signal(이탤릭), 2023/2025. Three-channel video installation. Concept image. Courtesy: the artist}