YOON Hyanglan creates her works by pasting papers on canvas, drawing on it with charcoal, and detaching the papers. The harmony between the marks of papers on the canvas and the lines drawn with the charcoal shows her excellent instinct and intuition, and is reminiscent of the wall paintings of primitive people who had to draw for their survival. The lines show emotions honestly and images with a single color tone remind appreciators of a cabbage. However, the artist did not create this work by watching, remembering, and de-picting a specific object. Rather, by changing the form in the manner of tearing off papers, thereby blurring the distinction between the surface of the artwork and the drawing, this work assumes an aspect of abstract expressionism, where only free expression exists.
As in this work, YOON Hyanglan’s recent drawings express thoughts abstractly, so organic images such as the cabbage no longer appear in her works. Likewise, collage and décollage are not used very much. Only lines within spaces exist. A canvas expressed with lines is just an abstract and expressive space that represents a mind, not a fi eld for artistic activities. Here, the drawing goes beyond the limits of preliminary tasks or drafts for a certain drawing and holds a value as a means of perfectly expressing the artist’s thoughts and emotional state.
As if complaining about her discomfort and tiredness due to having spent more than twenty-fi ve years of her life as a stranger in another country, the artist fi lls the canvas only with rough, crude, and abstract lines rather than images boldly removed. Tax receipts which are needed when living abroad are used as a canvas. The artist admits feeling pain in her daily life, saying “I feel frazzled and stressed when I have to handle monthly bills and documents, such as fi ling taxes, Maison des artistes, the rent, the electricity bill, the gas bill, medical costs and car insurance. These papers are scattered about my head, weighing heavily on my mind, stealing my attention away from my work.” However these only represent evidence and documents that prove her existence, so they are her other self. They are the very tools that allow her to live with her family members in France. They are symbols of her duty and burden she carries as a foreigner.
Although these are past, personal papers that can be discarded, their contents containing her joys and sorrows remain as symbols that cannot easily be thrown away. Did her wish to be consoled and to console others by revealing an ordinary story of herself and sharing it with others not lead her to do this drawing?
Documents involved in artist activities cannot guarantee a function as data issued by public agencies any more. This is because they have been provided with a new function as a canvas containing the artist’s thoughts and traces; now they come to exist as only an impressive work of art. This secret yet frank story of the artist who wants to be away from the here and now, namely the time and space given to her, is recreated as a story of all of us; it reminds us of a common fact that a personal story is the starting point from which to communicate with the world.
In summary, unlike in YOON Hyanglan’s past methods where techniques of collage and décollage were emphasized along with drawings, taking from public documents borrowed from recent daily life may look common, as the work contains the honest admission that the artist is an existential being. However, it also shows that such artifacts contain a large and important human story.
