Youn, Myong soon : An Image of Life delivered through 'Shaking Landscape'

Youn Myong Soon's Solo Exhibition

‘ At the moment when 'this is just this,' I shake, and at the moment when 'that is just that,' I shake, too. I wait long, facing the void of empty 'being' and then, turn around it all of a sudden to move slowly.

The wind flows between my fingers, as if it were dancing, and the nods of my finger joints respond to it. Everything moves.’ <2009 Artist's Note>

An Image of Life delivered through 'Shaking Landscape'

Written by Lim Jeong-hee (Aesthetician/art critic, adjunct professor of Yonsei University)

Youn Myong Soon's 'landscape' works project the reality beyond the physical law of welded copper wire and fired earth, while recalling the space far away or the time elapsed already or upcoming. The landscape-reality projected onto her works is not an actual landscape-reality, although it is placed in the every-day arena we can comprehend immediately. Her works reach the reality through pores, crevices, vagueness or discontinuity in 'here-now' instead of representing the objective reality or processing it intentionally. Namely, the artist does not represent 'the visible reality' but finds 'the invisible' between the chasms opened up by 'the visible.'

So, 'the landscape' shown in Youn Myong Soon's cubic works can be neither reduced simply to an object nor placed in artist's outside world, being separated from her. The house tied with thin or thick copper wires, the hill and trees surrounded by small earth lumps, and the vessels overlapped with the evenly unrolled earth plate and the copper wires. All of them imply an ambivalence. House, hill, tree, wood, cup and vessel, all visible 'here, now' may exist in time and space 'there, already' or 'there, still,' or otherwise, may exist as 'other something' instead of hill or vessel. So, 'the shaking landscape' with the perfectly same and continuous ring detached - everything is stopped without being shaken in the world connected by the ring of identity - is 'a craving landscape,' too.

What is interesting at this exhibition is that the works reflect two different perceptions of the reality, but such difference is not clearly converted into a form of expression. It is not because the expression is immature or incomplete but because the expression transcends the possibility of satisfaction and fulfillment. Shaking does not stop, and desire is not fulfilled. If not dead, the life shakes and moves. So, shaking and craving landscape is moving alive. But the landscape moving alive is not found if not related with the landscape dead and still. The landscape moving alive and the craving landscape form the relationships with the landscape dead and still and the materialized landscape filling the desire, respectively, only to be expressive. However, if shaking should be expressed as shaking landscape, the contents of expression could not be filled, and if the shaking landscape should not be converted in the infinitely different things, the contents of expression could not be filled. So, the artist does not suit the forms of expression to its contents, and at this moment of disagreement, she clearly reveals the object of expression not as real but as unreal image, while running about incessantly in the world of expression not fulfilled.

The open structure of expression is more visible in the series 'Landscape of Time' revealing artist's unique use of time. The artist converts the being of 'now-here' into 'sometime' in the past or future by riding over the reversible time with the power of imagination. As soon as 'I' become 'you,' you are there outside of you. Then, you are 'now, here,' but become the universe at large, and thus, contrast and distinction between me and you will disappear. The images of 'Landscape of Time' or 'Passing Landscape' are the important references for understanding of artist's spirit. Artist's state of mind dreaming of a world with everything in harmony instead of confrontation, fix, separation and expulsion is united with the nature. The artist believes that we and nature are one, and waits but shakes quietly to heal the scars, while delivering to us her sense and hunch of life warmly but ardently.