Painting: The Journey of Time and Space
2023
Jiyoung Yoo is a young artist who explores the conditions of contemporary painting. Focused on the theme of content and form, image and frame, and the relationship between painting and support, Jiyoung Yoo has been creating paintings, installations, and objects. Her fifth solo exhibition Traverse In Between (June 22 - July 22) was recently held at Gallery KICHE. Yoo showcased 27 new works that deepened the artistic perspective and explored new directions. Before delving into the details of this exhibition, let's briefly review some of the artist’s key works and subjects.
Jiyoung Yoo, a graduate of Hongik University with a bachelor's degree in painting and a master's degree in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, held her first solo exhibition Spilled Water at RAINBOWCUBE in 2018. In the exhibition, the artist presented paintings featuring various types of bird heads and bird eggs, showing unique shapes akin to toy stickers or the runners of plamodels. The parts depicting the primary images, such as the faces of the birds and the egg patterns, were cut out from the canvas and neatly arranged, and a scraped frame with missing core parts was placed adjacent to these pieces. Through the bird-shaped objects fixed in the gallery space and a canvas outlining the objects’ contours, the artist likened the situation where the painting and support were separated, thereby rendering everything incomplete, to “a cup with a hole in it and spilled water.”
“Water exists by being contained in the physical basis of the cup, and the cup gains its value of use through the water it holds. Then let's consider a cup filled with water but with a hole in its bottom is placed on a table, and a user sitting in front of it wants to drink the water. As soon as the user lifts the cup, the water deviates from its framework which restricts its nature, but at the same time, it loses its physical base and is on the verge of evaporating soon. As it loses its contents through the hole, the cup, once a transparent object subordinate to usefulness, strengthens its presence and frustrates the users.” Jiyoung Yoo reconsidered the identity of painting when the image did not fill the frame, and the frame did not support the image.
Water and Cup, Content and Format
Since then, the artist has extended her interest to the real world by holding a series of solo exhibitions, including One After Another at alltimespace in 2019, and Cupboard at ThisWeekendRoom in 2021. In One After Another, she intensively delved into the “frame of painting” by using objects with prominent grid characteristics, such as calendars, squared manuscript papers, and egg cartons, as motifs. While the first solo exhibition was a study of the ambivalent relationship between content and form, she became, from this point on, more interested in the “arrangement system of content.” She carefully examined the phenomenon where the contents of numbers, letters, and eggs are filled into the grid structure of calendars, manuscript papers, and egg boxes, respectively. The arrangement at this time is not restricted to a mere repetitive act of listing objects but can be expanded to orders, rules, and conventions of events. Just as pages full of letters become a book, brush strokes filling up paintings constitute an exhibition likewise.
In Cupboard, this arrangement system was extended to a domestic environment, namely “home”, and paintings were likened to “cupboards.” The artist questioned what the order would be if the visual components of the paintings were organized within a frame as if storing items one by one in the cupboard.
In 2022, Jiyoung Yoo garnered attention once again. She was selected as the inaugural artist for the ‘ROOM Project,’ the first solo exhibition program organized by the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art for artists in their 20s and 30s. For this exhibition titled Closed Containers, Yoo presented works in the form of drawers and clocks, which marks a transition from her previous theme “array” to her recent interest in “time.” Jiyoung Yoo gradually expanded the scope of her work beyond visible images to invisible areas such as time, thoughts, and imagination.
Traverse In Between is an exhibition where Jiyoung Yoo thoughtfully explores the concept of time. The artist started with a small curiosity, “Why is an hour 60 minutes and a year 365 days?” and expanded into a modern concept of time that has significantly impacted human lifestyles today. Among various artificial orders, she aimed “to examine the ‘frame of time’ as a system devised by mankind with a focus on ‘compartmentalization,’ seeking a way to traverse between chunks of the divided time."
Among them, Time Zone Panels (2023) is a series that started from the “standard time zone.” By the mid-19th century, each city had different time zones, but international time standards were needed as railroads developed and movement between regions increased. Based on the strict boundaries of Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) imposed on land with natural curves, Jiyoung Yoo brought the topography belonging to the same time zone to each panel. For the higher number of UTC+O panels, either the darker shade of wood species was used or more metal powder was added to Jesmonite. The gaps between different panels were connected using hinges, clamps, or locks, highlighting their artificial boundaries.
On the other hand, the Day-Hour-Minute (2023) and Long-Distance Relationship (2023) series focused on more personal time. Inspired by the fact that the time units in the duodecimal system were the result of segmenting 360 degrees of the Earth, the artist considered the canvas as a circular timeline. Here, she divided the angle of the circle based on the space she went through on the day and covered it with colorful paint over the dividing line to negate the gap in time. While Day-Hour-Minute on the gallery wall represents the time of the individual, the rather sculptural work Long-Distance Relationship installed on the floor shows the conflict between two time zones. It embodies the moment when people living in different countries interact online in real-time.
This exhibition marks an important moment for Jiyoung Yoo in her examination of the nature of things. However, considering her past practice, it is not an unfamiliar or alien change at all. She approaches the relationship between content and forms with a new lens centered around the societal system of time. From the painting frame that captures flowing images to the social framework that systematizes our daily lives. We can anticipate more abundant ‘water’ and a more diverse range of ‘cups’ that she will show us in the future.
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