We are delighted to announce the project selected for the inaugural edition of the Fellowship Program : "Ph-X" by HaYoung.

The jury, composed of Frédéric de Goldschmidt, Grégory Castera and iMAL team highlighted "the originality and coherence of a project that brings together contemporary scientific imaginaries, embodied experience, and experimental forms of interaction. Through a kinetic sculpture that challenges binary modes of perception, the proposal opens a thoughtful and timely reflection on uncertainty, multiplicity, and the conditions through which reality is observed and constructed."

HaYoung aims to develop an autonomous rotating sculpture based on Thomas Kuhn's rabbit-duck, originally used to illustrate the paradigm shift. Traditionally, only one animal can be seen at a time. Through rapid spin, the paradoxical figure renders both visible at once, challenging binary perception through quantum superposition.

Using a camera-based gaze detection system, the sculpture will respond to the viewer’s act of looking: the more it is observed, the faster it rotates. By reversing the classical principle in which observation fixes a qubit into a single state, the work proposes a permanent condition of coexistence where perception no longer collapses into either.

This piece is part of Ph-X, HaYoung's ongoing project exploring unstable matter through science and illusion, inspired by glass as an amorphous material, neither fully solid nor liquid, and from quantum theory, where a qubit can exist between 0 and 1 simultaneously. Thus, the project explores possible ways of existing within the interstices of Western identity systems.

While conceived as an autonomous installation for the Fellowship, the sculpture is deeply inspired by the performance HaYoung is developing with a magician, exploring superposition and entanglement through illusion, echoing Johann Zöllner's experiments with the medium Henry Slade.

The Fellowship would let HaYoung integrate mechanical language into their artistic practice, through iMAL's technical and curatorial accompaniment and the committed support of Cloud Seven.

HaYoung is a transdisciplinary artist. Educated at University of Seoul and the Villa Arson in Nice, they’ve participated in residencies at Artagon, the Jan Van Eyck Academie, and CIRVA Marseille.

As a storyteller, HaYoung seeks to infiltrate socio-political and technological systems through fiction and (mis)translation. Working with video, drawing, sculpture, data, glass, and scent, they create narratives that explore the layers of entanglement between materials, behaviours, and languages.

Their work has been presented at Centre Pompidou Paris [FR], Jan van Eyck Academie [NL], Fondation Fiminco [FR], Frac des Pays de la Loire [FR], International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen [DE], and Het Nieuwe Instituut [NL]. They have received awards including the Prix Région Sud Art-o-rama in 2022 and the 25th Prix Fondation Pernod Ricard in 2024.

In a cultural landscape seeking new connections, the Fellowship Programme proposes a renewed alliance between artists and those who support the emergence of their work. A new cultural model based on an expanded mecenat: more open, more engaged, and more attentive to the shifts in the creative world.

Conceived by iMAL, and in a context marked by profound ecological and social urgencies, the Fellowship Programme invites us to imagine a different way of supporting and accompanying artistic creation, based on co-responsibility, shared experience, and commitment. The financial support for the Fellowship Programme will come every year from a different art collector. The project was developed in cooperation with Frédéric de Goldschmidt, the founder of Cloud Seven, who will back the first edition.

Here, "collecting" means becoming involved in a process, being present at the moment the work takes shape, participating in the ecosystem that makes it possible, and supporting culture as a universal right