2022. 9. 30 – 10. 29

Jeongwon Yoon

“Our life is so full that it acts when we do nothing.”
– Gaston Bachelard

One of the things that humans have lost in the course of modern civilization pursuing rationale and intellect is fantastical space. GalleryJJ is pleased to present, once again, Jeongwon Yoon’s unique vision of such human desires and fantasies. Whereas Jeongwon Yoon: The Song of Spirits in fall 2020 focused on painting, this exhibition Jeongwon Yoon: Air and Dreams invites us to varied plastic arts through her recent video works, chandeliers, and objects embracing the space.

Yoon’s work finds beauty in life and daily routine. It encompasses various media from installation to planar work. Besides paintings with unrestrained composition and fantasy, she converges colorful props into the realm of art with ingenious imagination, especially well noted in the Barbie and chandelier series. Obsolete playthings reveal plasticity, and synthetic trinkets turn into fine chandeliers. Collaged and painted portraits of Barbie dolls at a real-person scale yield surreal appeal. When these objects enter the plane instead, they form a dense painting that embodies paradise in which all creations in the world concord and coexist without hierarchy. Nature appears as an image of restoration and salvation or a mythical and religious ground in tandem with art. Planar and three-dimensional works exchange their properties and traverse the borders between art and life, and dreams and reality, imbuing pleasant imagination to the routine. Her work restores our lost fantasies, the beautiful dreams.

Yoon attracted attention early on as the winner of the International Art Award at the Kunstverein Cologne while studying at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. She launched Smile Planet in 2007 to present an experimental site that simultaneously functions as an atelier, exhibition space, and retail store. The concept was further solidified later in ‘Dongdaemun Spirit!’ space at Dongdaemun Design Plaza. She connects art with industry and practices art in everyday life by crossing between art, design, and manufacturing. Also, her works demonstrate her wide range in employing mixed media and large scales. Work by the artist is held in institutional collections, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, and many hotels, department stores, and corporate offices.

Now the work faces a new turning point again. She moved to an unfamiliar seaside village on Jeju Island a year ago, far from her previous urban life in Germany and Seoul. This exhibition features recent works from operating in this new and unknown territory. Due to its radiant ambiance and dazzling air, she applies vivid colors in her work without hesitation. She produces content and title that reveal a new poetic sensibility from interactions with specific natural elements such as stars, rainbows, strawberries, oranges, birds, goats, ducks, and so on. Such titles include Strawberry Hunting 2 and A Leaf Umbrella, among many, and previous chandelier series, La Stravaganza and Flower of the Universe have turned into Vivace, reflecting a more dynamic rhythm.
The elements in her atmospheric picture plane yield a place for its literal lightness in air and dreams rather than a critical view of consumerism and materialism. The exhibition title derives from Bachelard’s essay, Air and Dreams, and always does art awakens hidden fantasies.

/Lightness
Colorful chandeliers twinkle like stars in the gallery space; composite flowers are in full bloom, and cords draw in the air. Barbie dolls and prop objects float between walls and appear in video works. Everything in her painting also seems weightless. Its pictorial space embodies flying angels, birds, ballerinas, musicians, plates with propellers, and cars hauling rainbows. Even those with a barbell or heavy instrument seem to fly away or swing from the rope. They seem like a whimsical sci-fi movie or wonderland.
Yoon’s work always has musical and dancing elements. For the new works on view, she has added and filled them with flight elements. She puts herself in complete solitude to engross in music and literature. While confronting herself, she shows incredible concentration and immersion in the work for a long time and pours out original works. Imbuing her imagination with those she encounters in life through synesthesia sensibility and her liking of Igor Stravinsky and Puccini’s florid music and George Balanchine’s ballet is evident in the works. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is known for its primitive color and innovative rhythm. Andre Schaeffner associates the origin of dance with the ritualistic behavior of the foot striking the ground, giving meaning to the trampling and rebounding leaps to be higher. The leap, the flight, is thus a basic reverie for humans, accompanied by lightness and freedom.
The transcendence of wings is indispensable in flight. As birds were the main character in the last exhibition at GalleryJJ, they still appear a lot in recent works. For instance, the blue-footed booby appears as a romanticist with courtship dance while a person sits with birds on a bough, reading books to one another and sharing food. “Even if trees sway, it will not be uncomfortable for the ideal dweller who sits high and reads.” Bachelard translates the imagination of a tree into that of movement. A nest in the treetops is a dream of power that appears in Yoon’s work. The primitive movement of the tree that connects the air and the earth, that is, the shaking of the cradle, gives happiness to trees, birds, and dreamers. They leap into the sky to soar.

Birds are often regarded as messengers or the lightest creatures. They are of liberty, as the German metaphor “free as a bird in the air” manifests. Lightness is freedom. They seek to leap. The giant wings of Icarus are not necessary for it. As Hermes’ tiny winged shoes denote, would not we be able to take off by the momentum from our small steps against the ground?
We dwell in the material and the spiritual domains concurrently. The oneiric utopia, devising the future with aerial imagination and winged lightness, is the hope for humans that Yoon visualizes in her work. The world of rhythm and dance in the human spirit, the world of no gravity unburdened from temporal weights, is an aesthetic certitude for her in which she summons our forgotten dreams. As if Hermes embellishes with music and leaps into the air, her poetic images uplift and upraise us.

/Play
“I choose my own feelings. Today, I choose happiness”
– Alice in Wonderland

The alluring chandeliers are assemblages of plastic fittings and sundries such as dolls, dice, beads, buttons, and zippers. They are elements of play and ornamentation. What is the artistic practice acquired by revamping these used items and collecting trinkets and industrial parts? It is not a mere nostalgic act chasing a child’s play but, as an artist, a long search for beauty trusting her inborn senses. Apart from the Barbie dolls being toys, they are apt to experiment with different colors, shapes, or materials she envisioned. She selects these playthings because of their incredible malleability and vividness unique to synthetic materials that are not easily accommodated by natural materials. They become the artist’s plaything with a different intent. Play-element and art often have been associated with sorcery or rituals since their inception despite their differences in methods of expressing desire or conveyance. They are both autotelic and elusive. The human mind begins to play in the realm of art and culture. Although it is hard to defamiliarize the familiar and continue to produce original combinations, she calls her working process a play by immersing herself and making it fun and thrilling. Perhaps this is why the viewers are naturally absorbed in this free world of play.
Yoon is the creator and partaker who integrates vision and reason to create a congruous language of things. Even in a mundane reality where function and labor are crucial, humans voluntarily fall into the fancy and play of the Internet and the virtual world, for example. Perhaps the deprivation of the unrealistic is the most dreadful deed to humanity. According to Johan Huizinga, humans are ‘man the player’ or ‘homo ludens’ who fashion nearly all ideas like beauty through fantasy and play, the culture of rituals, myths, and festivals. Humans who play thus could be the next ruler of this world. Furthermore, the idea of a beautiful nation that Friedrich von Schiller conceived of is also a utopia in which beauty itself is the object of aspiration, and such a restored play-element is the principle of society. The ultimate goal of play and imagination is beauty.

/Beauty
All the imaginative play outside the box is the driving force behind Yoon’s work, and the pursuit of beauty and freedom yields originality. Like The Butterfly Dream, we face peace and genuine autonomy at the threshold between the worldly and the imaginary. The ancient term eudaimonia means a happy world where all things in nature are in concord to live well, that is, beauty itself, the highest virtue.
Yoon’s work provides a visual experience that turns reading of its instrumental function into the object of beauty. In retrospect, with the development of the mass media and consumerism, modern art uncovered aesthetic imagination in materials such as iron, glass, and daily goods, and aesthetics in avant-garde provocation and kitsch had succeeded. Now the non-perishable synthetic articles surrounding us may be the new icon and nature of Anthropocene. Her sculptural work exhibits the aspect of contemporary art that come and go between fine art and popular culture and challenges art itself in such an eclectic art scene now, with a unique mixture of materials, methods, and concepts.
In other words, her sanguine images may seem to imply opposition to the selfishness and uniformity in society now, criticizing dissipation, or meditating on basic instinct and encouraging feminist view through the Barbies but again, their comprehension depends on the audience’s perspective. However, in this exhibition, if aerial life is real and earthly life is imaginary, as Bachelard states, the home in life is the blue sky in which breezes and bouquets nurture the world.

Never has a play as fun as imagination. Seeing through the eyes of a child is difficult for grown-ups, but experiencing an unfamiliar fantasy can stimulate our senses. Imagination is not only an experience of openness but also of novelty. Yoon’s work affirms imagination is not a state but human existence itself.

Gallery JJ
745, Nonhyeon-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea
+82 2 322 3979

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