A Globemaker’s Dream
: A Conversation with Chris Adams
with Chris Adams (Lander & May Globemakers)
2026
Artist Jiyoung Yoo simultaneously engages with the physical tools necessary to explain the continuity and the boundaries of reality and with distant dimensions that are difficult to perceive or describe, combining them sculpturally. Her recent series, Orrery (2025), begins with the device known as an orrery—a model that illustrates the orbital paths of the sun and planets. This object takes on a distinctive form: a globe tied together with knots, a central sphere representing the sun connects to smaller planetary models via various rods and gears. While obsessively tracing the origins of the orrery and the history of celestial observation, Yoo suddenly realized that this mechanism resembled the law of plants growing toward the earth. She juxtaposes the process in which each segment of a grass root widens its path through grains of sand to absorb nutrients with the way stars are connected along invisible pathways of energy, influencing one another. She then creates a three-dimensional work in which the upper spheres of the orrery are oriented downward like roots, while the patterns sketched on the ground ascend to the top of the orrery—an inversion of the structure’s conventions.
This method of association attests to the artist’s ability to read the movements of the universe, as embodied in the orrery, and the infinite loops of connection it forms with all terrestrial beings. For the artist, this object is less a device for mapping celestial paths and more an allegory encompassing the lives of every entity the galaxy bears. Once grounded in empirical data and factual evidence, her gaze gradually extends to the distant memories: the traces of waves in sand discovered on a beach walked with someone or the constellations that appeared and vanished repeatedly in the deep night sky. Traversing between historical records and personal recollections, this flow guides her toward sculptural decisions, organically influencing the external characteristics of her works. From the earliest stages, her work captures the repeated results of her formal experimentation: piercing and hollowing, filling voids with other elements, reproducing existing forms in different materials, and spontaneously assembling gathered fragments. The language of addition and subtraction functions consistently in Yoo’s work as a rhetorical strategy—removing the familiar to present new, uncanny symbols.
For instance, the Orrery series is created by inverting preexisting structures, stripping away familiar signs or meanings, and filling their space with something new. The many markers that once indicated the stars’ positions are replaced by the swell of waves, the uneven surface of sand, and chains tangled between pillars. The planets become clear, transparent beads, the tips of slender roots, allowing growth points to stand on a surface dotted with salt. In the works divided into two stages, the daytime landscape in Orrery_Dissolving Coastline (Day) reveals the shapes of shells one might find beside the clashing waves, while the nighttime scene in Orrery_Between Distant Stars (Night) presents black masses cut into paper stars that form imagined constellations. From the names and positions the artist assigns, these separate fragments suddenly converge into a single time and space, composing a miniature universe. A similar mechanism operates in the Day-Hour-Minute (2024–5) series, which derives from the shape of a circular clock. Here, there are no numbers. Instead, pigment mixed with water spreads across the cut and bent disks. The scales, numerals, and hands that would indicate time appear already dissolved and dispersed within the color. On convex mounds, the paint slips easily, while the color lingers darker in recessed grooves. As if acknowledging that she cannot govern or control every passing minute and second, the artist quietly observes the paint’s free movement across the rounded surfaces. Repeatedly scoring and wiping the surface to create and erase stains, the completed works protrude from the wall, overlapping with adjoining disks, or sometimes float alone in empty space like the moon or sun, evoking a time-space hazy and distant from memory.
The intersection of rational analysis and sensory resonance: choosing two options that might seem at opposite extremes in reality is, perhaps, akin to trying not to forget that the boundaries of yin and yang, though they appear distant, actually touch back-to-back. Yet people often forget this, or act as if it never existed, attempting to understand and conquer every aspect of what is. In contrast, the artist’s work, which had developed along empirical evidence and meticulous logic, reaches a certain threshold beyond which it can no longer be fully explained in human language, and instead leaps into a realm that is romantic and poetic. It is here that the possibility of narrative and insight opens up to one that cannot be explained, possessed, or encountered. Mysterious events and irresistible forces from the cosmos have always existed. Human history has often found its breakthroughs while striving to overcome them and repeatedly failing. According to Anthony Aveni’s Star Stories, work that Yoo occasionally refers to as a guiding force, humanity from the beginning has sought to find correspondences between sky and earth, using the laws of the heavens as fertilizer to cultivate imaginative narratives and interpret nature from a human perspective. In other words, contemporary life has reached the present through a process of observing and reorganizing nature. In the same vein, the origins of objects that the artist has been interested in from the outset—calendars, clocks, globes—reach far back in time, their invention emerging from attempts to understand the movements of sun and moon, water and land. Prehistoric humans sought spiritual meaning and guidance for survival from nature, and in the modern era, these efforts became the driving force behind advances in science, astronomy, geology, and archaeology.
I once thought that Yoo’s interest lay in exploring forms, both tangible and intangible, and in dissecting overarching categories into detailed systems. In the foreword to her 2019 solo exhibition, I wrote that her work “questions the chain of structures that objects naturally accept in order to acquire or maintain utility, and visualizes this question by applying arbitrary variations to each element’s position.” Indeed, at that time, she was replacing elements such as dates in a calendar, characters written on manuscript paper, water in a cup, the whites and yolks of eggshells, and the flesh hidden within fruit peels—concentrating on reflecting upon reality’s rules from a meta-perspective. She carried a sparkling belief that passing through this period of suspicion and curiosity might allow her to understand life a little better. Now, her gaze no longer lingers solely on materiality but extends toward the principles that govern the world behind order. Six years later, I feel the need to revise my earlier statement. Yoo now focuses less on manipulating the construction or function of structures themselves and more on observing the laws of the universe that underlie them, the phenomena that emerge from these laws, and the traces left behind by what has been given them significance. She embraces, with long, measured attention, the countless nonverbal and nonphysical factors that fold back and forth across time and space, shifting the flow of existence itself.
Perhaps she is someone who not only moves beyond the variations within the repetition and stability of discipline, but also admires and longs for the entropy of a world flowing from order into randomness. At times, she re-visualizes it under the name of art, unfolding the tangled fabric of the present like a cypher. This may be the guiding aim she has set for herself, at least for now. In these days when our bodies and minds cannot remain in a single time and space, and the folds of time that form here and there seem to move under different gravitational pulls, we find ourselves in need of a belief strong enough not to lose our way. At her own pace, Yoo drifts gently rather than anchoring herself in one place, subtly suggesting that now is the time to seek a new direction—one that lies at the boundary between order and disorder.