“Can we only wish?” Is there anything that people can do as they see, hear about, and experience in close or personal ways the endless crises, frustrations, and suffering happening around them? The questions and the artwork that Jiyoung Yoon latches onto have to do with the wishing heart. To assuage my struggles with the need to understand something about her completed work without being able to view it, I read some papers about the “ex-voto” tradition, which Yoon mentioned as a key reference in her recent work. As I did, a few odd questions came to my mind. How can we avoid despairing? How can we wish again while experiencing all this pain? How can we say that it’s not over? A universal part of human consciousness is the desire to allay our fears of death. We long for existence beyond or transcending death; we have the spiritual idea of being alive in order to stave off awareness of the body moving closer to death with each day. In connection with this, religion and ritual have formed time-honored cultures associated with the human race. But how can we see beyond the pain and speak of the world’s continued existence?

While we often hear about physical symptoms that cause intense pain as the stomach contracts, there is no way of actually knowing them without experiencing them firsthand. Even if we know going in, the experience is (might be) still unsettling and painful each time. Our consciousness blurs into a fog as we feel dizziness and an intense pain that seems to take our breath away. “Physical pain is not about or directed toward anything.” Pain overwhelms all things, erasing everything except itself. The declaration that there is nothing beyond pain is something the pain has brought about. As a guide, we might think of these words: “[T]he human attempt to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing ‘pain itself’ into the avenues of objectification is a project laden with practical and ethical consequence.”1 Pain and objects—but what is pain, and how can we perceive it? Perhaps a more direct and practical endeavor is to ask how pain creates objects. It is a matter of looking at what we have seen while acutely aware of pain’s self-silencing properties.

“The hole represents fear, pain, and death.” Jiyoung Yoon looks at white seashells. As she threads them into a necklace through holes bored into them, her hands stop moving. “Why did this hole arise? A delicate hole clearly appears bored from outside.” The fate of some mollusk that was victimized by a predator’s artisanal aggressions—removing the flesh and leaving only a perforated shell behind—leads the sculptor to contemplate her medium’s “exterior and interior, its hidden structures, and their respective roles.”2 Here, fragments of thoughts from the past and future are interwoven with the hole and its depth as a focus of fear, pain, and death. When pain leads us to wish for and rely on something to escape from its grip, this creates a belief that objectifies pain. So when the artist Jiyoung Yoon speaks of “wishing” rather than “expressing,” our first focus is on her visual methodology and its attempts not to preach a belief system, but to show the structures of will and reliance that create belief.


The Dialectic of Capability and Vulnerability

The balance has already broken down. The moment we become aware that one side is uncontrollably tilting, this ironically causes a clear premonition of the unfolding of one’s own language. This is a description of Jiyoung Yoon’s early work. A prominent example of this—which transformed into a series rather than an isolated creation—is ‘Dear Peer Artists’ (2014), which has to do with crisis. The crisis was an issue that the artist herself faced, relating to the precariousness of life as an artist. At the same time, it was also an issue shared with many other artists in a similar position of having decided to live the creative life. How does an artist live? According to longstanding psychological theory, human desires have a stepwise nature, where lower-stage desires must be met before the next stages can be achieved. In contrast with biological drives or the drive for security, the drive of artistic creation relates to higher-level stages such as the desire for affection and affiliation, the desire for respect, and the desire for self-actualization. Thus, if a person possesses the creative drive, we have to assume that their lower-level desires have already been met. As we all know, this is not the case in reality.
For Dear Peer Artists 1_Maslow, Bullshit (2014), Yoon created a three-dimensional sculpture with a two-dimensional diagram as a reference. This is a critical interpretation of the classic pyramid structure in the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow’s five-stage hierarchy of needs, with an approach that incorporates the horizontal framework of a radial diagram. The work was designed with five globes inflated by means of an air pump: each of them presses against the others until the weakest pops. While the criticism of fallacies in the hierarchy of needs is apt, it cannot be said that the life of an artist driven by the desire to create is “going just fine.” Yoon established a theory based on her own intuitions, in which differing drives exist in a relationship that is horizontal but necessarily involves mutual pressure, until the equilibrium finally breaks down and one side or another bursts. Each individual drive can expand to the limit of its capabilities—but because the different parts are controlling each other, no one of them can grow endlessly, nor can all of them be fulfilled to the maximum. Yoon’s work goes beyond referencing a diagram to conceptualize the expanding and mutually pressuring aspects of neighboring sculptures. Through its logical structure, it effectively conveys a psychological message.

This leads to a question: how does the individual go on once one side has broken down? If the central structure breaks apart, the only way to sustain the shape is to rely on a new structure provided from outside. Dear Peer Artists 2_Spherecal-bridge-moment (2014) centers on a spherical structure with holes bored into it. Strings pass through the holes and wrap around the sculpture’s body; within the hollow interior, they are likely to be intricately entangled. Wooden spikes of differing sizes and textures pass among the holes and strings, bending and breaking in the process. Also attached is an oval structure that faces the ground with its head slightly raised, fixing the sphere in place while also suggesting movement. Positing that artists play a mediating role in social ruptures as their lives are driven by unknown motivations that are separate from the fulfillment or alleviation of social needs, Yoon conceived a structure in which an external input is outputted through the outwardly soft, inwardly tough medium of aqua resin.

Jiyoung Yoon’s visual language, which adeptly applies social and psychological reflection to the sculpture medium’s explorations of physical concepts, has been visible since the early stages of her career. One visual methodology—that of dangling—has become a key visual language, which has undergone different variations. As an example, consider how Yoon approaches the written world in her various works, as seen in the aforementioned titles. In the Korean titles of her works Dear Peer Artists 2_Spherecal-bridge-moment and A Single Leg of Moderate Speed (2015), she runs the words together without spacing; in other cases, like That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is (2016), she disregards set principles of separation, separating syllables with underlines to render the written word strange. In a similar way to this linking of syllables or placement of them in new relationships, Yoon has used the physical shapes of her work and their suspension in the air to show the part and the whole in a special relationship of interconnection.

Traditionally, sculptures are placed on the floor. This relationship to the ground may be seen as establishing one of the fundamental conditions of the sculpture medium. Looking back at the history of art in the modern era, we see how sculpture acquired the pedestal as an indicator of physical independence once it spun off from its status as a decorative component of architecture. In the modernist art spearheaded by Western countries, the pedestal was reconsidered as part of the sculpture rather than an accessory. Not only have sculptures been presented together with various aesthetic supports that are integrated with their main structure, but they have also gained the ability to come down from their pedestal. As we break away from the practice in which the sculpture marks off a separate domain, the medium can be infused back into architecture and the landscape. When we consider the history of expanded forms of representation in contemporary art, our interest in the internal properties of sculpture seems like something written on pages from long ago.

This is one reason for focusing on Jiyoung Yoon’s approach to visual practice. While she carries on the classical virtues of the sculpture with her ongoing explorations of and experiments with different physical materials, she has also broken away from conventional sculptural methods to engage in creative, conceptual investigations of related practices. In the possibilities harbored by the visual language of sculpture as a classical medium, she sees the groundwork for contemporary artistic practice. The key element of the expansion in her work is not about the space or installation context that the sculpture physically occupies. It lies in her contemplation of the sculpture’s structure and the potential for sensory expansion of this sculptural examination. Returning to the matter of “dangling” in this light, we see that the relationships and balance among special elements assume greater importance when the sculpture is suspended in midair. In Yoon’s work, falling to the ground is equated with fracturing or bursting. The chain reactions among abstracted entities illustrate a theme that the artist has long been exploring: the structures of sacrifice and belief.

In Seeing Things the Way We See the Moon (2013–2014), the artist stages a precarious situation. Having bound her own long hair to a high ceiling, she hangs from a metal bar placed just underneath, exposing herself to a perilous situation that could end in her being scalped. Two assistants stand on ladders on either side of her, using office scissors to cut the knot where her hair is fixed to the ceiling. Once her body is free, she lets go and drops. Finally, she steps on a hollow turtle shell at the point she falls, landing with a cracking sound amid feelings of tension. Her risky feat can only be said to have reached a point of security once the shell has been broken. In her distinctive structure of visual logic, the artist is illustrating the question: “Is it possible to justify the sacrifices that a previous sacrifice leads to?” Not only in her material sculptures but also in her performance approach, Yoon adopts fascinating creative methods based on her conceptual explorations of the sculpture medium. Additionally, her creative process has created a system where she must exert the force necessary to hold herself up, while giving her full trust to others to whom she assigns a momentous responsibility in a relationship of interdependence. Here, she seems to illustrate a belief in the power of creation as a way of objectifying risk.

Inside and Out

In the work of Jiyoung Yoon, two different horizons intersect with equal weight. One is a critical thematic stance that originates with her personal experiences and awareness and that connects with social attitudes. The other involves conceptual ideas about material that arise from her understanding and interpretation of sculpture’s visual aspects. The work that results from this shows no direct indicators of social or political incidents. At their simplest level, we see objects designed in sensory ways; at a more complex level, we find what appears to be a meta-discourse on the sculpture medium. Often, this is where the interpretation of her work stops. Indeed, the history of modern art is one in which medium-related discourse has taken place autonomously. Contemporary art in a context in which art has separately emerged as a form of social practice that is not afraid to intervene. When things exist in between or outside the two, they can often be regarded as personal or abstract. Turning attention back to Jiyoung Yoon’s work, we see how it attempts to transcend this either-or approach to art’s social nature. The personal is presented as something social rather than strictly private, and interdependent structures emerge in the seemingly autonomous.

In her process of considering the invisible structures of incidents and the relationship between their inner and outer aspects, Yoon has appropriated mold-making as a crucial element of sculpture. A single concrete scene: in 2014, an incident occurred in Korea that was tragic enough to alter the very structure of people’s minds. It was only after undergoing a painful change lasting for a few years after the Sewol ferry sinking that she was able to address a social catastrophe that seemed to overwhelm her both personally and artistically. In No Planar Figure of Sphere_Allegedly Matt(2018), Yoon shows the planar figure of a human form, together with a sculpture component of silicone skin. Like the “sphere” referred to in the title, the human form incorporated into the work is concrete rather than an abstract shape. The human form used in the work was adapted from physical data for a man named Matt, which were purchased from a Canadian 3D scanning company. In A Letter to Matt (2018), the artist explains that it is “difficult to make a planar figure of a human body, just as it is impossible to spread a sphere out due to its curves.” Nonetheless, she adds that she has “done my best to make silicone skin to place on the gallery floor.” The 3D scanning data of the body is not enough to fully grasp the human shape; realizing it as a physical sculpture is an even more impossible task. The result presented in the work is a shell without internal structure, unprepossessingly pressing against the ground.

In many industry areas, 3D graphic images are often used to show things that are not actually present or to explain things that cannot be shown in a particular place and time. The same is true with disaster reporting in the media. Even when the photographs and videos showing the ship upside-down underwater are vividly realistic, no one viewing them can truly understand the situation. During the attempts to grasp the tragic particulars of the incident as they gradually came to light, 3D simulation images began appearing in the media to analyze the process of the ship capsizing and the passengers losing their lives. In this case, abstract 3D images become metonyms for the human body. But as Yoon’s work No Planar Figure of Sphere_Allegedly Matt shows, the shapes cloaked in human bodies do not actually represent anything; they convey very little about the person behind the shell. Reduced to a shell, understanding crumbles to the ground, unable to stand on its feet. Very often, the pain evoked by real-world irrationality and overwhelming violence seems enough to make art into something very small and private. Sometimes we can only succumb to feelings of self-deprecation, helplessness, and shame, or seek comfort in fleeting moments from an insular world. Amid all this, Jiyoung Yoon stifles her screams and confronts her endless questions as she attempts with difficulty to speak out. She comments on the concealed aspects of the world, the shock that comes with their revelation, and occasions for turning subjective perceptions and lives on their head. She makes us ask why and how we are looking at certain aspects of what we are viewing.

Sculpture is the body. As seen with the minimalist sculpture of the past, abstract sculptures with the same dimensions as the body can evoke a sense of phenomenological presence in the viewer in front of them. Jiyoung Yoon has drawn both implicit and explicit comparisons between elements of sculpture and the human body. Instead of using the same cold, anonymous industrial materials as minimalist sculpture, however, she prefers working with amorphous, fleshy materials such as latex and silicone. Rather than delving into the externally visible surfaces, she seems to want to stimulate tactile sensations by imagining what exists beyond the flesh, as well as the narrative thinking that arises from that. Like physical symptoms, the sensations of the skin resemble photographic paper upon which the hidden inner workings are developed. In the Still of the Night (2019) is a spherical sculpture with a similar volume to the human body, which is designed to reveal stories inscribed on its surface as it reacts to the surrounding temperature. To see the obscured content, the viewer has to hold the sculpture close and convey the warmth of their body. As the artist explains, the viewer also has to continue withstanding the heat of their own skin. Where No Planar Figure of Sphere_Allegedly Matt used the human form as a metonym, the sculpture in works such as In the Still of the Night—which offer a more in-depth presentation of the artist’s ideas about the body—becomes a metaphor for the physical person. When sculpture metaphorically presents the body, it demands an expanded kind of reflection on that body. At the same time, the body is also a metaphor for sculpture, demanding an expanded interpretation of the sculpture medium’s visual aspects.

One of Jiyoung Yoon’s primary focuses is on the female body. In Korean society, women’s bodies are a battlefield on which the symbols associated with discrimination operate in the most extreme ways. The reemergence of feminist attitudes over the past decade or so represents a larger global phenomenon. In Korea, the #MeToo movement and other hashtag campaigns began surfacing around the culture and arts worlds in 2016. As women’s movements proliferated online, they began powering a social debate by intensively visualizing previously concealed realities of sexism. Misogynistically motivated crimes began receiving major media coverage, with repeated displays of commemoration and condolences toward the victims. Amid all this came news reports about the so-called “Nth Room” on Telegram—a case involving the production and circulation of videos showing women coerced into situations of sexual exploitation. The shockingly systematic nature of the crime and the enormity of its scale forced people to confront a structural collapse within society. More than just an issue of pornographic perspectives in which women’s bodies were sexually objectified, this was a frightening episode that alluded to the future destruction and alteration of humanity. Sensing the urgency of the situation, Jiyoung Yoon adopted an unusually straightforward figurative approach to create her work Leda and the Swan (2019). This work, a collaboration with female tattoo artists, explores the iconography from a Greek myth concerning rape by the god Zeus, while redirecting the voyeuristic perspective toward the male rather than the female. This appears to mark the time when the artist began focusing her explorations more on attitudes relating to women’s shared existential horizons.

It is not only personal misfortunes and social catastrophes that threaten to erase individuals and art. More than a given incident, it is the incident’s structural core that operates in more destructive ways. Jiyoung Yoon engages in a deeper exploration of sculpture’s inner and outer aspects as she reflects fundamentally on women’s corporeality and stands up against different forms of crisis. When individuals around the world were isolated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist began working to visualize a painful self-consciousness and discordance that seemed to grow in proportion to the impoverishment of physical perception and experience. Me, No (2021) is a human-sized work in which six figures with identical volumes but different shapes trade “clothes” with each other. One sculpture in the shape of a pillar with a star wears the skin of a spherical sculpture, which seems ready to split apart; the star sculpture’s skin hangs baggily over another sculpture in the shape of a pillar with a heart cross-section. The sculpture’s frameworks—their outwardly visible interiors—are presented in Vantablack, which reflects almost no light. Silicone has been used to make the exteriors: the clothing/skin is precariously draped over rigid structures that tear through them in places. The mournful beauty conveyed by the work leads the viewer to consider the misalignments between interior and exterior, the scars of separation, and the story of how these six sculptures quietly came together.


To Deliver

The visual language of art can often be subtle and poetic enough to give the sense that it refuses to present itself clearly to all. Yet this subtleness is not meant to exclude others; it is intended to implicate them more deeply and elicit emergency thinking. In a Seoul art world that has been generally urgent and exhausting over the past decade, Jiyoung Yoon has tenaciously and uncompromisingly sought her own language. At the same time, exhaustion and extinction appear to have been constant concerns. The physical properties of sculpture are such that it is fated to wear down and age, and time takes its toll on the physical capabilities a person needs to work with such heavy and demanding materials. At the everyday level, the human body’s perceptions and senses have been transforming with the spread of digital media. In the face of global ecological crisis, artists whose creation involves physical intervention must consider the ethics of ecological (non-)intervention. In a world like this, can sculpture and the contemplation of its medium survive—and if so, how? One thing is clear: The fate of sculpture as an artistic medium is not separate from the fate of existential subjects and individuals as members of social structures.

Rather than seeking a lone path of autonomy as an artist, Jiyoung Yoon has been willing to embrace the chaos of dialogue and collaboration. In one interview, she said that it is “important to me to surround myself with people whose ideas I believe in” and that “only then can I ask questions, listen, and accept.”3 During the pandemic, she co-created the 2020 work To Deliver with Stephen Kwok, a fellow artist living on the other side of the world. Amid the constraints on physical meetings, this creation captured a desperate attempt to share physical characteristics (if only) through digital space. Faced with the uneasy premonition that everything she had known and believed might disappear, she relied on the powers of friendship and solidarity to make creation and life once again possible. She had no choice but to give everything and “deliver.” The pain that we endure without escape—without even thoughts of escape—has the merciless power to turn everything into nothing. Here, Jiyoung Yoon has always sought out all things as though starting over from square one. This inevitably demands all one’s strength. It may not be clear what each of us is looking at, but vision is ubiquitous and fairly granted. What is not visible here does exist—through the choices of the sculptor.



1. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, Korean trans. Mei (Paju: May Books, 2018), 10.
2. Jiyoung Yoon, The Back Stories (2023), video presentation given at Common Ground as part of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Artists-in-Berlin program. https://vimeo.com/858739023
3. Jiyoung Yoon (interviewee), Wonjae Park (interviewer), “Artist Talk | Jiyoung Yoon,” ONE AND J. Gallery YouTube, February 25, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7m2qTO5lQM

References

• 올해의 작가상 (Korean Artist Prize)