The Holes on a Closed Canvas
: Jiyoung Yoo’s Colander (2021)
2021
Jiyoung Yoo’s support—much like the phrase ‘spilled water’¹, where the subject and object of the action remain unclear—is both to be penetrated and penetrating, straddling the boundary between the passive and the active. The support is both the foundation of images, and consequently, an image itself that precedes them. Before it is fixed as a transparent window that represents the world, it casts a shadow in reverse onto the images it holds within. (Or, it is shadowed.) The grid Yoo weaves is not merely an imaginary coordinate for measuring a phase; rather, it protrudes, pierces through the images, and overturns the relationship between figure and background, asserting itself as a solid, opaque presence. Its contents (the images) cannot completely penetrate this inscrutable grid. Only when parts of the passage are obstructed does the new painterly space that the artist has constructed reveal itself.
Colander (2021), presented at Yoo's third solo exhibition Cupboard (2021, ThisWeekendRoom), can be paraphrase into a ‘strainer’ or a ‘filter’. Then, what things are ‘filtered’ through the supports? Unlike her previous works, not many seem to be left after going through the colander. As symbolised by a bare thin grape stem, withered cherry seeds and stems, the white plane, which appears to hide all its substances, is tightly closed with the solidity of a well-finished cupboard. Perhaps for that reason, they are equipped with rather functional-looking handles that, alongside closed colour fields, constitute Yoo's canvas, which is paradoxical as it always has been. If we opened this surface, inside would be a small gap (which we can look through the egg-shaped engraved holes) made by layering two wooden panels. However, the invisible horizon the viwers encounter may not be that thin. The reason lies in the shared premise that the contents enveloped by the metaphors she frequently employs—such as eggs, cups, seeds, calendars, and manuscript paper—are all capable of fluid movement or proliferation. At the moment when a small, handspan-wide gap, created by layering heavy physical strata, expands infinitely through semantic imagination, Jiyoung Yoo’s composition constructs an illusion devoid of déjà vu.
In the Calendar (2019) series, eggs were displayed within a three-dimensional grid, reminiscent of a Matryoshka structure. Now, in Colander, they precariously balance on a curved 'threshold'. This light tautology reads as an abstract of her overall practice. Yoo’s ‘colander’, sometimes with gaps so tightly woven that nothing could slip through, resembles a solid shell. At the same time, like the flawless form of an unblemished egg, it is almost too beautiful to serve purely as a container. Just as viewers readily overlook the fact that the plaster-cast eggs Yoo creates have no actual distinction between inside and outside, the supports she constructs assert their own perfection, granting them the authority to close themselves off before an image can even emerge.
The most anomalous element in Colander is perhaps the small drawer in the fourth panel. With a thickness comparable to the gap implied in the third panel, the small drawer emerges in relief from the fourth. Here, the frontal gaze is obstructed, permitting only an overhead perspective. This is the only space that actively engages the ‘inside’, where a few dried cherry seeds and delicate stems rest. The flow of vision, which initially glides along the surface, gathers and drops in the direction of gravity, perceiving depth. However, the depth realised in Colander does not penetrate beyond the surface; rather, it clings to it. Concealed at a 90-degree displacement within an impenetrable dimension, this depth remains as a footnote, reorienting the directionality of the support rather than adhering to its conventional attributes.
Jiyoung Yoo’s painterly space insists on a physically dualistic state of relief—either recessed or raised—while simultaneously unsettling the symmetry of binary oppositions, hinting at the presence of an absent content. A cupboard that cannot be opened, like an unbreakable egg, entails physical limits beyond its boundaries yet alludes to the possibility of an invisible illusion. Thus, could her paintings, which resist being dismissively classified as purely abstract by relying on representational motifs, be considered the most intellectually rigorous form of trompe-l'œil? A veil, emptied to fullness with intaglio-carved icons.
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¹The title of Jiyoung Yoo’s first solo exhibition: Spilled Water (2018, RAINBOWCUBE)
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