The Dissenting Hands
The practices employed by the aforementioned dissenting artists are characterized by a deep-seeded respect for the materials and an emphasis on the intuitive decisions made during the process of creation. While many artists set about to create work by first establishing a firm conceptual framework and then executing it, either by way of their hand or that of an assistant's, the dissenters believe that which is created instinctually while in the creative moment, engaged with the materials, is inevitably of far more significance.
The unfortunate artistic practice of removing oneself from the art-making process and allowing studio assistants to render, sculpt, etc., recently celebrated its 700 th birthday. Damien Hirst , Takashi Murakami and the spirit of Peter Paul Rubens hosted an extravagant fete. The vast majority of the international art community attended , assistants in tow , and congratulated each other on a job well-conceived. However , missing from the celebration were a number of conscientious objectors who still find fulfillment in the creation of their own work. These dissidents included, among others, El Anatsui , Mark Bradford, Steven Charles , Soyeon Cho, Andy Goldsworthy and Sora Sim.
Sora Sim's material is glass. She has worked steadfastly with it for a decade, nearly her entire career, and has developed the understanding and familiarity with the medium that is necessary to be able to work extemporaneously. She has manipulated glass in a multitude of ways into a multitude of forms, constantly innovating, always seeing new elements of beauty in its physical properties.
For her exhibition at The Brain Factory, Sora Sim created two monumental installations. Looking Through the Divided Lines , 2010, a tapestry-like construction comprised of hundreds of slender rows of teardrop-shaped glass forms suspended by fishing line, is a dynamic visual experience and clearly demonstrates the artist's mastery of the relationship between glass and light. It's presence in the front of the gallery, in close proximity to the ever-changing natural light of the storefront windows, evokes the kinetic nature of a Calder mobile in that the work could never be viewed in the same state twice. Just as apparent is the artist's astoundingly labor-intensive process. Each teardrop delicately shaped by hand, each strand of fishing line patiently woven through several forms and meticulously set.
The second installation, Glass Bottle, Line and Space of Green , 2010, is a dense field of synthetic grass, each of the thousands of blades created from broken bottles and gradually installed by the artist in the back gallery throughout the course of the exhibition. In this work, Sora Sim confidently raised the curtain that usually separates artist and viewer and allowed the world to behold an artist in the midst of creating a work where the results are uncertain, but whose love of her medium and belief in her intuition are evident.
In Zen culture, fulfillment is achieved only through moments of clarity that occur from direct experience, rather than from sacred texts or impassioned sermons. Sora Sim knows artistic fulfillment well, and in this exhibition she has created an uplifting experience for those who have grown tired of wondering where the artist's hand stops, and his assistant's begins.
