Haena Yoo’s site-specific installation The Oriental Sauce Factory symbolically renders the anxieties of a post-pandemic global system as an industrial/medical mechanism that manufactures an elixir infused with an amalgamation of remedies— a special “sauce.” The foundation of The Oriental Sauce Factory is informed by Yoo’s father’s factory in Korea which produces various soy-based sauces that are sold in Asian cuisine restaurants. Yoo incorporates the logic of Marcel Duchamp into the manufacturing process— specifically the tenets of his seminal work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23 also called The Large Glass. This piece depicts a diagram for an allegorical machine which, when interpreted with Duchamp’s notes, can be seen as a pneumatic apparatus of unconsummated sexual desire. Just as the Duchampian Bride is the source of desire, motivating the bachelors with her electromagnetic transmissions of sexuality, The Bride in The Oriental Sauce Factory is a reservoir that holds the source of the sauce: a mixture of water and meju. Born in South Korea, Haena Yoo works between Los Angeles and Seoul. She received her MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and her BFA from Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul. Yoo makes installations constructed with found materials, video, sound, and smell, exploring themes of labor, identity, and global capitalism. With a tinkering process, she is interested in the urgency created by limiting materials to what is at hand, showing the archeological and socio-political status of the maker. A 2018 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann emerging artist grant, Yoo has had solo exhibitions at P.BIBEAU (Brooklyn), u’ (Calgary), and a two person show with Erin Calla Watson at AS IT STANDS (Los Angeles).