Crevice of Time
2024
It is always a challenge to bring the subject of time and space into the consciousness of painting. This difficulty is because they are not only a topic of discussion across all disciplines including philosophy and science but also the foundation of nature that humans cannot escape. Throughout history, the systems of time and space have functioned as a comprehensive and complex structure of the world, and with the advancement of technology, they are increasingly composed of more extensive and precise mechanisms. The task of driving the specificity of painting from this space of time is a task for everyone, a very difficult one – one that requires bold courage and meticulous execution. Artist Jiyoung Yoo’s interest is in what occurs between the whole and the parts that sustain this solid system of time and space. While the system exists as a huge whole, it functions through closely knit parts. The two are interconnected and dependent on each other to create the system. So what kind of relationship do the whole and the parts of the system have, and what is happening within that relationship? Yoo’s work is a pictorial exploration of this open-ended question, and it is about the strong tension and deep crevice that arise in the gap between the whole and the parts. To this end, she needs the images of the system that are familiar to us. They are mediators of universal and strict order, such as clocks, calendars, and units of time that indicate time. Within this conventional principle of time, her work spatializes individual time and constructs visual elements for the concept of time and space.
Sleeping when it gets dark and waking up and being active when the sun rises is not limited to humans; it is also a natural rhythm that animals and plants share. In this respect, living organisms are a kind of clock, and our lives, like clocks that are born, grow old, and die, do not allow even a moment of pause. However, this diverse existence of time converges as a medium that indicates time in the system of civilization. The temporal system quantifies the perception of time by converting it into numbers. For example, we do not sleep when it becomes night, but when it becomes 11 p.m., and a day is not defined as the time between when plants begin photosynthesis with dew on them and when leaves fold with the dark but rather, as 24 hours consisting of mornings and afternoons. Meanwhile, the numerization of time that constitutes the entire system simultaneously and clearly shows the temporal horizon – the past, present, and future. The history of the past, the diagnosis of the present, and the outlook for the future may exist as everyone’s time through the mathematical parallelism and disconnection of time. However, individual time can never be included within this system. While we own the same time, we also spend it differently.
In this sense, absolute temporality inevitably includes relative time, and relative times are necessarily subordinate to absolute time. Knowing this, Yoo does not express a critical view on either absolute time or relative time, standard or individual time. Within these two contrasts, however, she raises the question that the existence of time always is lacking. This limitation can be seen in the fact that the artist herself needs time as a systematized and disciplined system, and she creates her own timetable every day and lives by it. Of course, the plans and predictions of the system embodied by an individual do not guarantee certainty about the present. Rather, the hour hand that the clock points to and the numbers on the calendar that point to tomorrow are like empty containers that promise nothing. The future, nothing but an indicator of uncertainty, reveals its outline only in the present in its moment. This mechanism is also related to the uncertainty of the past where memory and oblivion operate. Compared to the dynamism of time that can be referred to as the present, numbered time is always valid only when it has an independent boundary.
Yoo’s Calendar series (2019, 2023) consists of twelve panels corresponding to a year. In the middle of a large grid is a number indicating a day that becomes a “container” or a shelf, which constitutes a month. She explains how the unitization of days, months, and years indicated by numbers functions through the mechanism of “cutting”: “Cutting time into a unit called day and juxtaposing one day with another, perceiving time through this chain structure is closer to the experience of disconnect rather than connect or continuity.” This series, which composes the structure of a calendar into a three-dimensional space divided into individual compartments, is a logical evolution of her previous work, Colander (2021-2022), in which she created an absurd furniture in the form of an unopened and invisible “container.” This work shows her tendency to use the system that urges us to pose questions and demonstrate our habits’ limits. In the Calendar series, the parallel container structure – calendar – shows the limitations of a system that cannot contain the uninterrupted nature of time and numerous variables. A day expressed numerically can never express continuity, nor can it reflect the different lives. Rather, the system stubbornly evades continuity and reflection and maintains its universality. In this sense, Yoo materializes the continuity of time and the reflection of self-consciousness in the form of a Calendar, which is not flat but three-dimensional and not disconnected but metaphorical. The matrix of numbers that make up the calendar changes into a container that captures countless daily masses, opening it up so that any time can be introduced. In addition, inspired by how eggs are standardized and placed in a regular frame to become food produce, the artist uses the shape of an egg in some blank spaces and the outline of an egg in some months to indicate each day.
In particular, this ever-changing Calendar is structured through the tension between disconnect and continuity, constants and variables. The date of each cell and the letters densely written between them are planes which are also allegories of the language system, and the empty or egg-shaped blank spaces of the day are created as three-dimensional spaces to be filled with individual time variables. In her work, the relationship between the two-dimensional plane and the three-dimensional space operates as a unique formal language through the mutual intersection of system and change, whole and part. This approach is deeply related to the understanding of the absolute plane of painting. In other words, her exploration of spatial expansion originating from the plane of painting manifests in a three-dimensional form. As a result, she gives life to a robust metaphor for time and space found in the intersection of the two and three-dimensions. This dimensional dynamic is the process in which the concept of time becomes space through painting while also becoming the path through which the pictorial space acts as time. Within the Calendar, the territory of painting, the place of text signifying meaning, and the notation of numbers in which the universal system operates share the “plane.” Further, the realm of self-consciousness, the space of continuous movement, and the representation of how individual systems operate require “three-dimensionality.” In her work, time and space are presented as a strange system amidst the coexistence and conflicts of planes and three-dimensionality.
The year 2020 may symbolize the global fear of the COVID-19 pandemic. Series Clock (2020-) is about the time that Yoo experienced during the pandemic and is a work that began to deal with the subject of time more intimately. At the time, she was living in the United Kingdom and had no choice but to be confined to her own space during the lockdowns (like many others). At that time, she felt as if the pulse of time had disappeared, and she was bewildered and inspired by that sensation that there was only time while its movement had evaporated. The Clock series, based on the icons of mobile applications that were most familiar during the pandemic (like many others), has a dual structure. The movement of the clock is superimposed against a silhouette that reveals material flows that cannot be fixed, such as the boundary between land and sea that changes with each wave and the shape of clouds that changes with the weather. The fluid outlines derived from the changes in nature, such as the coastlines and clouds, appear each as solid objects.
In the Clock series, the contrast between the dynamics of nature that interlock and chase each other and the time system that demands clear boundaries and precise measurements is born out of the desperate times when we experienced the world only through the indifferent hands on clocks and application icons within a confined space and without any vitality. In particular, this pictorial clock, which has only one hand and rotates at different speeds, ticks endlessly toward the curved time that the system’s time cannot reach, the time of the individual. Reminiscent of the coastal sand in its color and texture, the Jesmonite plate contains the shape of the surging sea and the boundaries that change each time. When this intersects with the clock hands that seem to endlessly rotate on a flat surface, time becomes fluid that flows, seeps, and mixes, that is, a time that can be realized through painting. This form takes its inspiration from the shape of the application icon and the liquid-like properties of paint that are transferred onto the painting. For the artist, painting is not only a matter of a flat surface but also one that melds into an image of time that has the unique material nature of a painting. The Clock series contains the indefinable state of the world in the form of a normative system while re-interpreting it through the flow of painting, creating a strange turning point in time. In other words, her attempt to combine the properties of materials’ nature with the language of painting allows for the coexistence of solids and liquids like the tip of a wave sweeping over the shore and allows us to witness the intersection of the past and the future found in the present.
In this context, Yoo’s works follow her interest in the physical properties and materiality of painting. One example is the Time Zone Panel (2023) series presented at her solo exhibition, Traverse In Between, held at KICHE in 2023. This work, which was created by borrowing the form of the time zone demarcation line divided by the standard Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), is composed of panels made with a mixture of Jesmonite and iron powder and cherry wood that are interlocked in the shape of the UTC boundary. They, however, seem to be loosely connected by chains or iron clamps, creating an impression of a mix of robust stability and precarious anxiety. This structure, which seems to be on the verge of collapse if not for the fasteners supporting it or a weak chain that can be easily dismantled, bears suspicions about the fragility of the rules and order surrounding time. At the same time, the work reflects the usefulness and futility of norms such as drawing non-existent boundaries on a map and the demarcation of time that divides the pan-natural system of planetary movement into sections. Her continued contemplation around these topics can be shown in her work, Time Zone Panel, which is composed of a plane of wood, iron powder, and Jesmonite panels, as in the Clock series that uses Jesmonite to portray the theme of a coastline. The composition casts its gaze into the deep crevices of the space-time perception system, where errors and uncertainties have accumulated.
In the same exhibition, she presents the Day-Hour-Minute (2023-) series along with Time Zone Panel. In explaining the work, Yoo says “It’s a series of paintings that record an artist’s day on a circular canvas, reflecting the fact that the unit of time in the 12-digit system is the result of dividing the angles of a 360-degree circle.” As mentioned earlier, she has been recording her daily schedule in a circular form, and this routine lifestyle, a kind of a personal system, is also the fundamental reason why she became interested in the spatialization of time in the first place. In addition, a circle can be a thought of as a frame for perceiving time, and the three-dimensional medium created by a one-dimensional line rotating steadily on a two-dimensional surface essentially becomes a formal basis for approaching the multiple dimensions of time. While the Day-Hour-Minute series is consistently based on a circle, it does not show anything about the time system. As a vaguely segmented, fragmented, overlapping, and folded clock that moves in the transparent direction of time.
For example, Day-Hour-Minute_3 hours 20 Minute folds and unfolds a fan-shaped piece of time to visualize a certain moment. With its colors and brushstrokes, this piece of time that moves between the two and three dimensional reflects the self-consciousness of the person who lived that time and carries an individual’s future narrative that will be filled with opaque practices. In this sense, in the totality of normalized time, the riddle of partial time continues, divides, crosses, and swirls into different sections, creating dregs of time like Leftover (2023), or becomes a frame of time like Day-Hour-Minute_A Day, fading into a complete anonymous day. Furthermore, since Day-Hour-Minute is the geometry of a day that none other than Yoo has created or wanted, all of these days are spatial records of a person’s time that continued on different circular grounds.
All the times that Yoo presents is occupied by crossing paintings and sculptures, which makes each day connect with the painting and music. In this composition, music is another time that unfolds and freely floats within the frame of standardized time. At the same time, painting also appears in the category of space but as one that is endlessly distorted. The way the artist spatializes time is also a resonance that is expressed as a system of time like music, and a logic that waves in a space like painting. The small and countless systems that exist in a huge web are built through our actions and breaths while the system also densely intersects and forms various layers of time results. This hue of time, this confusion of time is the blank space in the system that Yoo is trying to explore. In turn, it allows us to fill the emptiness of the difficult metaphysics of time and space, which are everyone’s challenge, in the form of painting.
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