Renewing Sequential Landscape
2021
After Monday comes Tuesday. Then, passing through Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Monday begins again. This sequential arrangement forms a unit that, when repeated, constructs the customary twelve-month cycle of time. Letters, following several rules, join together to create words, and when these clusters are arranged in sequence according to a user’s intent, they become sentences. These sentences, in turn, are systematically compiled within a physical framework, ultimately composing books or manuscripts. This tacitly agreed-upon linear system, determined by socio-cultural conventions, is often invisible yet functioning as a condition that defines or constrains the meaning and form of the entities within it.
Even in everyday objects, it is easy to find functionally optimised systems of arrangement or bundling—eggs are packaged in standardised cartons and consumed in fixed units, while manuscript paper limits the number of words per page. Jiyoung Yoo questions the chain of structures naturally accepted to acquire or maintain the utility of objects and deliberately displaces elements within these arrangements to make such issues visible. Several hypotheses underlie her approach: If part of an entity escaped from its designated mould, what changes would occur? If our belief in continuity within a sequence was partially disrupted, what would we then be able to perceive? For example, like in the Calendar (2019) series, could an egg leave its carton and instead be inserted within a calendar’s grid? If so, how would the meaning and function of the egg and the calendar change? If part of the painting’s surface containing a perfectly composed image was torn away in Bric-à-Brac (2019), where would the fragmented image spill out to?
The exhibition space unfolds as an exceptional situation that materialises these questions. The containers that define the arrangement system of objects appear as torn or perforated grids, suggesting their original function has been rendered somewhat obsolete. Colours, numbers, and images that have detached from these structures spill into the three-dimensional space, intermingling with one another. Inside and outside the frames, eggs, citrus fruits, and cups are arranged according to the artist’s arbitrary decisions. Though they may seem randomly chosen, these objects once again evoke Yoo’s critical enquiry—they inherently carry the attributes of the system they belong to: the soft peel of fruit exist as a skin that determines the size and shape of its segmented pulp within, while a cup, designed to hold liquid, functions as a higher-order concept that temporarily preserves and shapes its contents. Through the process of selecting seemingly unrelated classification systems within which she switches, rearranges, and layers everyday objects, experimental subjects employed by Yoo become mediators that confront us with the artificiality of everyday structures taken for granted. In other words, in One After Another, she shifts her critical lens to the broader classification systems of reality and the dynamics of human perception through painting’s sequential relationships between image, canvas, and wall.
Does Yoo, then, seek to negate or dismantle these arrangements altogether? By eliminating the conceptual and physical instruments that structure thought and action, is she attempting to declare the end to countless systems constructed by cultural norms? The urge to hastily direct her work towards a final destination of fixed meaning is merely a repetition of the longstanding habit of neatly organising meaning within yet another linguistic framework. Perhaps there is no absolute logic or breakthrough that can fully dismantle the chains of signs and significance in the world. Rather, wouldn’t lingering at the threshold of structural models that generate units of meaning and persistently modifying them allow for an effective critique of their mechanisms and attributes? In this context, her gestures serve as subtle signals that unsettle the ingrained perception of reality embedded in familiar and ordinary objects. These signals allow the viewers to have space where they can drift between entities liberated from meaning and the form of enumeration.
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