Poster image of 《Miss Lamella》 © CR Collective

CR Collective presents Yoo Seungho’s solo exhibition 《Miss Lamella》 from November 14 to November 30.
 
Yoo Seungho’s doodles are the result of a conscious unconscious process, in which the hand moves while consciousness gradually intervenes. Certain sections of the large-scale painting series ‘Miss Lamella’ reveal a symmetrical structure that becomes perceptible only upon close and sustained observation; this is a form produced by the artist using both hands simultaneously.

A pair of winding, wall-like line drawings both imitates and indexes the structure of the human body. The way Yoo first renders images on a large surface resembles human intestinal movement—largely governed by involuntary muscle activity, yet occasionally intervened by conscious control. Like human physiological processes, the doodles he produces while holding fountain pens in both hands appear to follow a natural order.

At one time, all-over painting may have been regarded as a symbol of noble liberal democracy, or as painting in its purest form—art for art’s sake. At least here and now, however, it appears as a product of nature, like a deep and clear ocean or a rippling forest.
 
The artist sprays a fine mist of water over the line drawing using a spray bottle. The accidental spreading that results, in the artist’s words, is “a new form that emerges on its own, beyond expectation,” and he describes it as “a feeling of receiving a gift.” These chance formations then lead, like a chain reaction, into new intentions.
 
The concept of lamella—a layered structure—or a folded chain is borrowed to draw an analogy between the artist’s compositional method and the structural process by which molecules meet to form stable, solid configurations. The artist discovered that the forms he constructs using signs and images resemble the molecular bonding patterns of lamellar or folded chain structures in chemistry.

Thus, he considers the dense handwritten marks that constitute his earlier works as “molecules,” and through a series of processes builds up layers, forming structures akin to stable polymer crystals. Yet paradoxically, the fixed and determinate meanings carried by language are dismantled in the process. Ultimately, Yoo Seungho’s work embodies a coexistence of contradiction: the conceptual structuring of form and the simultaneous deconstruction of meaning.

In doing so, it attempts to construct a more solid formal and conceptual system, while revealing that such meaning remains fluid and never firmly fixed. Interestingly, in actual lamellar structures, folded chain configurations rarely achieve perfect crystallinity, and instead contain irregular, non-crystalline regions.

These forms appear as if governed by a force acting upon the molecules, as though possessing a will—oscillating between consciousness and unconsciousness in their formation. Yoo Seungho visualizes a reflection on the structural form of language and the meanings it carries by metaphorically linking such molecular structures to textual structures and his own working process.
 
Images produced through the oscillation between consciousness and unconsciousness, and those transformed and altered through dispersion in water, are reconstituted into new forms through the artist’s renewed intervention of consciousness in the drawing From the Bridge. Within this drawing as well, one can observe non-linear transformations occurring across individual forms.

The poem presented alongside the drawing is a textual translation of the drawing into sentence form. Composed in a system resembling idu (吏讀) notation, this text does not maintain a tight correspondence with the image, but instead emerges as a loose and newly formed context. Such connections between painting, drawing, and sign can be understood as a synthesis of discrete pieces of information linked through discontinuous connections, as seen in the artist’s earlier work hypertext.
 
When polymer materials forming lamellar structures are processed through heat or similar means, the layered structures gather and connect through several linking molecules, or tie chains, forming a more stable spherical configuration. Yoo Seungho dissolves his pen drawings by spraying fine mist, allowing signs and images to react as if in a chemical process. Based on this, one might imagine that the drawings and texts generated through such chain reactions are likewise connected by invisible strands.
 
The exhibition title 《Miss Lamella》, like Yoo Seungho’s previous solo exhibition titles, is a form of wordplay in which the Korean and English titles are not direct translations but loosely connected while carrying different meanings. As in his work, it implies that language and text do not possess fixed meanings, but instead operate as fluid systems that can shift depending on context.
 
From text-based landscapes to doodles, wordplay, and hypertext, the point of departure in Yoo Seungho’s practice has consistently been the blurring of boundaries—whether between subject and background, or between sign and meaning—and this remains an ongoing concern. The imagination of molecular structures at the nano scale, while materially real in themselves, renders the boundaries we perceive and experience increasingly ambiguous.

What ‘Miss Lamella’ ultimately suggests is that such ambiguity of boundary and form may in fact be the most natural state. Keeping microscopic structures in mind, the artist produces pen drawings and, quite literally conducting experiments, sprays mist onto the surface—performing various experiments within the field we call “painting.” This can be understood as an exploration of the gray zone between drawing and painting, and beyond the domains of science or art, as a form of “natural painting” that visualizes the inherent structures and images of the world.

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