artwork. The world that seems hopeless, which runs contrary to the delight experienced by trivial
events in our every day, is what I want to deal with in my art. Public visual discourse around the
private thought is what I hope to generate in my artwork. By doing this, I believe I can communicate
with viewers about the importance of private thoughts.
 |
| installation view ‘Hast Thou Seen The Star’, Insa Art Space, Seoul 2010 |
 |
| (left)Secret Star(orange neon) neon light, wood, 60×60×60cm 2010 (right)Secret Star(yellow neon) neon light, wood, 60×60×60cm 2010 |
 |
| installation view ‘Hast Thou Seen The Star’, Insa Art Space, Seoul 2010 |
 |
| installation view ‘Against the Sculptural’, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul 2009 |
Secret Star
Yoon Kyong-man, Curator of Kimchongyung Sculpture Museum
Since 2005 Chun Young-mi’s work has appeared considerably avant-garde. Her work is far away from the volume of a three-dimensional object with sculptural composition and plasticity. Departing from conventional style drastically, her work focuses more on its content, naturally forming her own distinctive idiom for expression.
Chun represents unreasonable aspects and ironies discovered from what we all think quite natural in daily life. To do this, she transforms a narrative structure into a symbolic form. This aspect became apparent in works she did while staying in London. Of those works, I Hate This Material World and An Abandoned Rabbit are particularly eye-catching. The two works reveal her critical eye toward the world. The artist gave a performance conveying a message, “I hate this material world’ to a banker and recorded it. She also found an abandoned rabbit doll and documented this in photographs. This work demonstrates her acutely critical view of the world. These pieces help viewers understand her life as an artist who is closely linked to the world while maintaining a certain distance from it. She has evolved her subsequent experimental work, using a wide range of mediums.
The unexpectedly small, rough works such as A Bird, A Fire Tree, A Cloud Tree, and A Butter Brain assume a significant role in demonstrating her work’s main themes. Strictly speaking, it is too much to classify them as serial pieces. Through these works, the artist seems to search for an unreasonable relation in language and communication, and a combination of illogical concepts from many various angles. In her work ‘language’ is replaced with ‘form’ which is made from a simple composition of materials such as cotton, paper, butter, and wooden chopsticks. Her work’s tough magnetism may be called ‘the aesthetics of triviality’. A skeptical examination of semantics through her unique language and form is at the center of her work. Second Floor shows her exploration of semantics. This work presents the concept of the second floor derived from her unique idea, not as a conventional architectural structure. The viewer is allowed to walk on the floor, made of a thin layer of cement, and he or she feels as if its breaking. This concept of the second floor is exquisitely linked to the process of the visitor understanding it through his first-hand experience.
In recent works addressing the motif of stars, the artist presents the image and meaning the general public has from a special angle. Chun takes her motif from a star-shaped ornament on a bracelet her friend gave her as a gift. A star shape was initially just a symbol kept in her private memory. While her work evolves, the stars represent storage of memories. Rock Star, Shooting Star, and Secret Star encapsulate complex artistic discourses. Rock Star and Shooting Star focus on the issue of semantic skepticism above mentioned, while Secret Star represents a process of securing meaning form symbolizes in space. The five materials with the same length are arranged in space, which looks like a star with five vertexes when viewed from a certain fixed direction. When viewed from other directions, it seems disassembled. Secret Star has a Minimalist element in that this work is produced through an analysis of the elements of simple form and experiments with the conditions the form can be made from diverse angles. Chun focuses on not only an emotional aspect of the symbolic star shape and its connotation, but also a narrative structure of the process this deconstructed form is perceived as a star image at a moment through the viewers’ movement of their positions.
The star imagery, symbolic and suggestive, invokes our abundant emotions and lyricism. Dividing its basic unit, the artist installs luminous bodies such as fluorescent and neon tubes. In Secret Star these tubes form a star image, and then return to being floating fragments in space. Through this process, viewers recall and pine for the beautiful memories kept in their hearts. In her work objects turn to lights infiltrating the viewers’ hearts. They bring about countless meanings for many viewers.
