Solid and flexible mesh of life

Yoon, Jung-Hee’s works are mesh structures made of cold metal wire, but yet portray a warm feel- ing of life within. The objects are simultaneously solid but flexible like our vigorous lives or how ideal arts should be. Yoon’s art can resemble many different forms such as micro organisms as seen under the microscope lens or deep-sea organisms without eyes or colors, well risen breads or cotton candies, and ghosts in a kid’s imagination or vegetables hung under the grandma’s roof. The fine folds both represent the imagery of creation unfolding lives and of destruction closing them. The creation and the destruction can be defined as the process of transformation or metamorphosis rather than the mechanically repetitive cycle. In this aspect, the works present organic forms in an intergraded stage. The subtitle of the exhibition, “From a Seed”, reveals Yoon’s intention to gather the primitive energy and substances bringing the lives. Forming various transparent layers, each work is full of folds representing the unique quality of organisms.

The “seeds” with organically shaped folds are infinitely rolled one up into one another like Russian dolls, as Deleuze said in “The Fold”. The first organism is called to unfold its innate parts when the time comes. One destructed organism is not just destroyed but rolled up and refolded into the original one. Like seeds, Yoon’s works synchronically present several layers which will be unfolded one by one following the inherited information. Although the way of installation varies - from objects hung from the ceiling, laid on shelves, or fixed on the wall - all works show variable plant shapes based on symmetrical mesh structure. The layered structure forms both shape and volume. Yoon came across this medium accidently on her university grounds in Cheongye-cheon area. She found copper wire is rigid enough to create form yet soft enough to weave. And since her first solo exhibition 2009, the artist has used it as her main source of material.....

.....In this exhibition, the billowing shapes with several layers have vitality like protoplasm. Getting out of the ordinary space for art works, the objects take their place on the walls, ceiling and the entire floor as a total ecological system. Some works placed on the floor seem to come out or disappear from the base and others hung from the ceiling look like webs of spiders or silk worms. Scattered bodies without organs seem to have a desire to transform themselves by connecting to something else. Loose but heavy shapes reflecting gravity allows us to guess its density. Such as animals, plants, decomposing organs or clouds, these images have common elements that all layers are towards the center; the outer layers have lower density than the center and all with a flexible contour......

......The only difference is of scale and density but it is hard to find absolute beginning in the shapes. Filling time and space, the chain of transformation in the work expends out. It follows the rule of algorithm and the irregular jumps never happen. They increase their entropy toward the creative disorder but are not oriented to dissolution. As their round and cohesive forms are closed and opened at the same time, they maintain compact mesh shapes as well as have embracement and variability. Such transformation is accomplished by the repetition of difference. Folds are the main prototype to design new transformation rules to communicate with something hard to encode. Through this prototype, the grid forcing to confine the civilized world is transformed to a mesh with liberty.

by Lee, Sun-Young, Art critic