[Jungyoon Hyun] Critical Essay/ Soyeon Ahn

 

An Image as a Structure

Soyeon Ahn

I should start this writing with All this way to meet you (2022). The form, which combines metal chains and plastic clay, has two secret spaces. There is an inner space for bonding with each other between chains that have their own structural forms and clay that exists as a material, and there is an outer space created by the single form of the two joined together. Therefore, the title of the work “All this way to meet you” can also be comprehended with two meanings. You and I in the sentence can be identified as the two components that form a single sculpture, and it also could be portraying the relationship of looking and being seen between the sculpture and the body facing it. Anyhow, the two spaces, the two comprehensions, and the two gazes are simultaneously working together as they display secrecy amid strange tensions.
 
The metal chains exist as objects that cannot stand vertically because of their weight in reality or at present toward gravity, along with their volumeless surfaces. The clay firmly upholds any shape from the floor based on its underlying cohesive and coagulable abilities. The metal chains penetrate through the form and determine the scale, and the clay defines the volume that allows random shapes to have a direction of movement, like the muscles attached to the bone. Thus, the conditions of a sculpture are fulfilled. The sculpture at this time repeats perpetual conflicts and reconciliation between the impulse to induce waves of particles and the obligation to force particles to freeze. For example, the relationship between the chains and clay defines the sculpture's interior and exterior and propels the general perception and awareness regarding the form. However, it could be a twist between the two. In the areas where the bones are clearly exposed, the clay is permeated into the gaps of the chains and is clinging on, evoking the image of a precarious transition between the interior and exterior. This spatial overturn brings the sculpture to be perceived as an indication of an ongoing transformation rather than an already complete form.

All this way to meet you,

steel chain, plastic clay, acrylic paint, 80x67x47cm,

2022

 

One of the pieces from the same period, I grow when you fall (2022), also shares a similar sense. The combination of metal rods and resins has a very close resemblance to the sense revealed by the union of metal chains and clay in All this way to meet you. Thus, the two or more spaces that the two form inside and outside, the dual relationship between you and I encompassed in the title of the piece, and the gaze or the movement of the gaze that changes according to the relationship are once again repeated in I grow when you fall.
 
I have seen at least two figures standing facing each other on a diagonal drawn from two corners in the same space sharing a flat floor, specifically All this way to meet you and I grow when you fall. In the two-person exhibition with Mark Yang, Inanimatefy (2022, VSF), Jungyoon Hyen depicted a scene as if the two pieces were exchanging their respective lines, "All this way to meet you” and “I grow when you fall.” At the site, I got over you (2022) and I got over you (almost) (2022) were hung side by side on the wall like reliefs. If they were placed on the floor, they would have given off different motility. However, as they were hanging on the wall, the two seemed as if they were trying to declare the classifications of their own forms from the wall toward the inner space, or vice versa, while strongly expressing a sort of instantaneous force of condensation. By doing so, Hyen's sculptures take in the physical condition of the form and the contour on the surface as borders and push hands/bodies to extend in pursuit of signs of transformation toward the outside and the inside.

I grow when you fall,

steel, resin, silicone, silicone pigment, 60x134x66cm

2022

 
**
 
Hyen jumps into the imagination of space in a sculptural manner. Just as Gilles Deleuze traced the power and movement that mediate a kind of transition through Bacon's pictorial senses, including the relationship between forms and spaces, in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation, 1981), Hyen constantly recalls the spatial situation in which certain shapes emerge through sculptural senses. Regarding these figures, Deleuze said, “Thus isolated, the Figure becomes an Image” and described the appearance of the images in Bacon's paintings as such figures as “the figure, which would move along the armature together with the pedestal.”[1] Georges Didi-Huberman describes figures as a comprehensive image, and he explains images in relation to the ghostly remnant, like fireflies.[2] The figures that emerged from Deleuze and Didi-Huberman's observations and converted subtly through Hyen's sculptures are a sort of image that implies the possibility of expanding to spatial imagination and the sense of division and overlap of time.

 
This is an old theme that she has dealt with in the form of video and installation in her work even before she newly recognized the sculptural sense through sculptural mediums and techniques. At the time, she pursued a way that combined time and space that can re-mediate the reality/present like a montage. As mentioned earlier, her recent sculpture pieces have combined media, forms, and narrativity (without descriptions) to be able to determine the dual/multiple relationships between individual components. Thus, they directly remind us of the sculptural senses that constantly re-mediate the remnant figures/images around forms.

(Left) I got over you (almost), steel, silicone, silicone pigment, 37x58x16cm, 2022

(Right) I got over you, steel, silicone, silicone pigment, 34x38x14cm, 2022

 
Therefore, I think I should wrap up this writing with All this way to meet you. The sculpture created by combining metal chains and clay is a kind of image that personifies objects and materials. Furthermore, it induces instant imagination about the two and brings out human figures. Thus, it opens up the inner and outer space around the piece. The object and the material are combined to bring out the figure that faces oneself, and there are unintended traces of countless lines in space and the borders created by them. Through the process of attempting to create indestructible images at such borders, it allows us to imagine the newly overlapped physical and abstract time and space, in other words, sculptural time and space. Its faint clue can be found in the unfinished pencil drawing on the empty wall of Hyen's studio.

[1] Deleuze, G. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation (1981)

[2] Didi-Huberman, G. [2018]. Survival of the Fireflies [Mitchell, L. S., Trans.]. University of Minnesota Press. [Original work published 2009]
 

Soyeon Ahn (art critic)
Soyeon Ahn is an art critic. She has been interested in image thinking through language and has tried various writings. Recently, through the critical language and the act of writing, she is looking for the value and practice of artistic life. She is also experimenting critical collaboration as a creation. As a critical speaking activity, she planned and conducted“Interview Project-Artist of Our Time” (2021), and is researching the conditions and processes of contemporary change in sculpture.