A World of Parts
Han Noori
“Circles gradually lose their roots. Yet they discover their new roles and nature.”
A structure connected around a single large circle comes into view. A pair of scissors appears above it. Beginning at the center, the scissors cut away the branches connected to the circle. The many small circles and lines that have “lost their roots” are transformed into forms governed by a new set of rules, becoming “parts” that can be dismantled and reassembled at any moment. This description refers to a drawing that appears at the bottom of one of Ye-Eun Min’s artist notes. Inserted alongside the opening statement, “a world in which only parts exist, without a center ,” the drawing offers an important clue to understanding the artist’s practice.
- Not One, But Two
What kind of world is implied by Ye-Eun Min’s notion of “a world in which only parts exist, without a center?” Extending the act of cutting beyond the drawing, the artist turns to three-dimensional space itself. In the work Lavihamahamahyunchuchuhappyj33atomausepponssugizetteblackbyungddoungkkeong... (2019), presented in a solo exhibition that year, an actual rectangular prism measuring 150 × 240 × 150 cm was physically cut apart and dismantled into six separate pieces. The cuboid, once a complete spatial form composed of twelve edges, eight vertices, and six faces, is reborn as a collection of “parts” through the artist’s act of cutting. Although these parts no longer possess the complete set of edges, vertices, or faces that defined the original cuboid, they nevertheless continue to function as spaces. They are spaces in which enclosed interiors are opened outward and previously hidden surfaces are exposed, retaining the potential for continual expansion and further disassembly.
Using the limited surfaces of these parts as supports, various objects, including digital clocks, lights, blinds, and switches, are set into operation. These are objects the artist personally purchased through secondhand marketplaces. Installed within the cut sections of the structure, these objects reactivate the space, lending it the appearance of something inhabited and alive. Having lost their usefulness and been cast out into the world again, these objects are displaced from their original locations and functions. They break free from the orbit of a single person’s memories and habits of use. Drawing upon the familiarity of mass-produced objects and shared experiences, they become triggers for memories that can be awakened in anyone. In other words, they cease to be someone’s possession and become everyone’s. Here, we encounter the artist’s act of cutting once again. Ye-Eun Min cuts into what once appeared to be a solid space, while simultaneously removing objects from their original contexts and rendering them incomplete. These parts—or fragments—acquire new possibilities in a liminal state, gradually shedding their roots, as the artist suggests in the statement quoted above.
The possibilities embodied by these fragments may be understood through the form of “memory,” something Ye-Eun Min has collected through objects. Unlike the artist’s earlier works, When Memories Assume Particular Forms (2024) focuses on the nature of memory itself and attempts to render it visible. The objects collected by the artist are secondhand objects bearing signs of prior use. While these traces may prompt familiar recollections, they inevitably reactivate memories that are never exactly the same. Objects move through our lives and take shape as different forms of memory. Memory emerges from the traces carried by an object, the person who encounters it, and the encounter between the two. And when you encounter that same object, the memory changes once again. As Ye-Eun Min has remarked, “Memory has neither an original nor a copy,” and “each instance exists only as a new original.” Perhaps the “parts” that appear throughout the artist’s work are, like memory’s own originality, complete entities in their own right. The birth of complete parts and the opening of an original memory to many—these are the possibilities revealed through the artist’s act of cutting. It is this gesture that makes Ye-Eun Min’s practice distinctive.
- Not Two, But One(s)
Having painstakingly cut these parts apart, Ye-Eun Min brings them together once again. In Two 2015 Daisso on White, Special TV, Chris Giliberto, Wallpaper, Rubber, and Daebeom Mart 180, 180, 180 (2020), the artist gathers the parts into what appears to be a single mass. Yet this assemblage is not organized as a unified or completed structure. Rather, it appears as a loose entanglement of disparate elements. Around and through these parts, the artist introduces immaterial elements such as sound, electromagnetic waves, and light. Light penetrates one part and casts shadows onto another. Sound resonates as it moves through the gaps between the parts. Here, sound is generated through audience participation. By connecting a mobile phone to a Bluetooth audio device incorporated into the installation, visitors can play whatever sounds they choose. As each viewer encounters the work, the sounds change accordingly. At times, no sound emerges at all, leaving only silence to occupy the space.
In Connecting the Unconnected (2023), Ye-Eun Min attempts to connect parts through color. The artist gathered discarded objects found on the street and brought them together in a single location, painting a blue field across their surfaces. At first glance, this field of color appears to function as a line that binds the objects into a unified whole. Yet a closer look reveals that the seemingly continuous line is in fact interrupted at various points. Color appears as a device of connection in Even in Moments That Seem Perfectly Aligned (2025), presented in the artist’s recent solo exhibition. Here, Ye-Eun Min assembled a sculpture from fragments left over from earlier works and painted its entire surface black. Across the sculpture, darker black planes with distinct textures emerge irregularly. When the work is viewed from all sides, these planes appear to align perfectly from a particular vantage point. Yet the moment one steps away from that vantage point, the colored planes fall out of alignment again, seeming to drift across the sculpture. In these works, the artist’s act of connection generates a simultaneous sense of cohesion and dispersal. Rather than being reducible to success or failure, they reveal both the possibility and the impossibility of connection.
Why does Ye-Eun Min present the possibility and impossibility of connection simultaneously? Is it meant to expose our persistent desire for a perfect whole, for a moment of complete alignment? Or does it call attention to the assumption that connection can only be considered complete when it resolves into a single whole? The artist speaks instead of “the remainder that always escapes.” Light casts different shadows depending on the surface it touches, and those shadows continually change their form. Sound can be transformed by its surroundings, and the landscapes we perceive shift according to our position and movement. These constantly changing parts do not function merely as components of a larger whole. They depart from the whole and exist in their own right. The connections Ye-Eun Min pursues are therefore not meant to bind separate parts together through a logic of sameness. Rather, they seek to reveal what emerges in the space between distinct entities. Not one made from two, but one(s) in themselves.
- Perfect World
Perfect World (2025) consists of nine sculptures selected from the 31 “parts” that Ye-Eun Min has produced since 2019, all of which share white surfaces. Gathered under the shared condition of “whiteness,” these parts initially appear to form a unified structure. Yet each reveals subtle differences in form, texture, material, and method of fabrication, gradually undoing the connections that seem to bind them together. The sameness of white, the first quality to register in the viewer’s perception, slowly recedes, allowing the individuality of each part to come into sharper focus. In this sense, white, which initially seems to guarantee structural coherence through its appearance of flawlessness, was never the “perfect world” these parts inhabit. As the artist writes, “A world that appears perfect is only a temporary state. As time passes, it disperses once again and continues to move.” The parts quietly drift away from their commonality, or from a single structure.
In this way, Ye-Eun Min does not simply gather parts together and define them according to a single category. Rather, the artist reveals them by allowing them to exceed the very structures that appear to contain them. The artist’s practice consistently cuts into the center, concentrating on making visible the many “parts” that disperse and fall out of alignment from that center. In this respect, the work resonates with the proposition of French philosopher Alain Badiou (1937– ) regarding the fundamental nature of being: that the world is constituted not by the One, but only by multiplicities. Furthermore, much like the “empty set” that Badiou presents as the ground of all being, the artist’s “parts,” despite their apparent incompleteness, carry the potential for new forms and unforeseen possibilities. The entities that inhabit Ye-Eun Min’s works—discarded objects, partially severed surfaces and edges, and fields of color that seem at once to connect and to disperse—all embody forms of incompletion. Yet they simultaneously reveal a latent condition capable of endless differentiation and proliferation.
Alain Badiou writes, “We must sustain the act of breaking away to the very end.” In this sense, Ye-Eun Min’s work strips away the fictional closure of the whole, allowing parts, what might be called Badiou’s “multiplicities,” to continue their endless departures. The stage the artist constructs for these departures is a world of multiplicities, and indeed the reality of multiplicity itself. Let us return to the artist’s opening proposition. The artist imagines “a world in which only parts exist, without a center,” grounded in the conviction that “there is no such thing as a complete world.” In order to make sense of a world marked by overlapping crises and the beings that inhabit it, Ye-Eun Min turns to irregular “parts” rather than the reassuring image of a singular, unified whole. The world that the artist presents may well be a perfect world from which a new beginning becomes possible.
