Close your eyes and delve into the darkness. Penetrate the immensity of the infinite matrix space where time gets bet and where space becomes distorted by gravity, where the light retains the exclusive power to awaken or to create the void and to transform silence into a “Rhapsody in Hypostasis.”
Is Creation a punctual, constant or recurrent occurrence? Does it have any conscious ambition to conquer and perpetuate itself? Has Creation any purpose?
The subconscious memory of Yang Soon-yeal engraved in herself the history of the dawn of Creation, this cosmic knowledge etched in every particles inhabiting us and forming a part of a whole.
The hypostasis is an underlying substance supporting and sustaining the whole, and regarding Soon-yeal’s artwork it symbolizes the very link between each different themes disclosed in her imagination and notably in one of her major artworks “Mother Ottogi”.
A sculpture of all dimensions as it can represent a figurative form, with curved outlines in three shapes materializing a triangle and delineating a geometrical figure in a spiritual aspiration.
Keeping altogether the balance of the work, the base is curved to trigger the movement of the pendulum and the gravitational fields bending time-space. “Mother Ottogi” is the demonstration of the unity existing in the duality of two opposing forces such as Ying and Yang, Man and Woman. Maternity for Soon-yeal –in the intrinsic sense of the interconnection between past and future conversing with one another and enlightening present times in the material and spiritual- doesn’t have any feminine nor masculine definition. It appears rather in the core significance of her artistic concept as the gestation towards which Humanity is driven.
Erwin Schrödinger in his book What Is Life ? suggested that atomic structures hypothetically living in the cells were organizing themselves in order to reproduce.
We all have this perpetual quest of the Other. Our feelings of solitude and incompleteness reveal how we are made to function inside networks as puzzle pieces unveiling their meaning solely when connected.
Yang Soon-yeal perceived this inner renewal insight towards Life given to each individual, the generative renewal she calls “Maternity” that she fathomed and materialized in “Mother Ottogi” so as to awaken a universal consciousness.
One characteristic feature of the inert substance is its capacity to compartmentalize. It organizes itself to create a differentiation. When you mix oil with water, they separate into thin layers deposited on the surface, proving that inert matter can self-organize. It seems to be a result of the automatic mechanisms of the replication principle in chemistry.
Laws of physics and chemistry are the same in the whole universe and congruent with the entire cosmos. The “Mother Ottogi” works array this consciousness of the rhythm able to give life to the matter and to creative thinking.
“Mother Ottogi” as well as « Homo Sapiens » manifest themselves thanks to the multiplication that Soon-yeal exhibits in her installations, in a search for the representation of an ideal being who rose to the absolute perfection of the indefinite fraction of the space between spirit and matter.
“Homo Sapiens” are a sequential theme that Soon-yeal has been exploring for 15 years, seeking the exceptionality of the human being liberated through time and history from his animal instincts so as to emerge as a better self in the grand scale of human evolution. However Soon-yeal models with her own hands each “Homo Sapiens”, breathes life into them by utilizing numerous materials, thus forming unique configurations and expressions to each and every one of the hundreds of Homo Sapiens she kneaded and shaped. She intervenes in the life-giving impetus and in putting to death those fleeting existences, of this civilization in the making created in the image of humans in all their flaws and imperfections. Yet this time they are moulded by a methodical intervention coming from a structured and orderly action, “divinely” omniscient.
This insatiable “Homo Sapiens” evolving in time was composed in the idea of the primitive chaos, as well as the body of work “Brainburst”. The large-scale paintings, explosively intense, are flecked with a tumult of stirring colours and ebullient materials in a sort of commotion narrating the secrets of a pending conception or of the primordial chaos. This prescience led Soon-yeal to
nourish the matter with both Homo Sapiens and “Brainburst” paintings, and to whisper to us the history of the Genesis.
Nature is involved in Soon-yeal’s multimedia creative variations. It dictates its laws, the chromatic and materials choices and the lessons learned from light. Be it with clay, bronze, aluminum, plastic, textile fabrics, ropes, pigments or video, she probes the existential need to live in a reformatted dimension by spiriting away nature’s energy. Thus, with the paintings from the series “Dream Scape”, Soon-yeal discloses her heavenly hopes on round shaped canvas or cut mimicking the lunar orb. The eyes are raised towards the moon as a blank space, uninhabited, where humanity can reconstitute itself and rethink its actions in an elsewhere, mirror of Earth.
This oneiric and nostalgic vision conveys Soon-yeal’s ethereal emotions in her art piece named “Scarlet”. Large paintings take over the canvas, inundate it with areas of colours. Those spacious flat tints, almost monochromes or with luminous and warm tones, evoke the original atmosphere of the earth when life forms ingeniously subsist among an articulated silence.
This relentless pursuit of Creation is punctuated by milestones but also by simpler events of Soon-yeal’s everyday life as a child in Andong in the North Gyeongsang Province in South Korea. This period was tinged with a traditional culture, without much financial resources, as all the materials that could be possibly found were converted into toys: Ojami, Ddakji and Guseul are the works that the artist tenderly put together to celebrate with immense tenderness and nostalgia this time when it was all so much easier, when all the materials had an innocent and joyful genuineness. This latent happiness, almost idyllic, emerges from the videos of children playing in laughter and euphoria. Skipping ropes are lying on unrestricted and welcoming areas, hopscotch squares are marked out on the ground, everything in perfect accord and conversation reminding us of humanity in its full innocence and emotional generosity.
The exhibition is presented in the Zaha Museum, anchored like a ship in the upper part of the city, supreme ruler over the surrounding exuberant nature. The alert walls of the old town face the museum buried in lush greenery and keep the past alive and alert. The silence of the place acclimated itself to echo Soon-yeal’s fecund work.
It is a work of universal vocation, narrated with a planetary dimension through a cosmic and multidimensional consciousness. Soon-yeal chants her poetry in rhapsody, contemplating and foreseeing the day when Humanity under the reign of emotions will renew Life by giving primacy to harmony and altruism.
Corinne Timsit
Corinne is a president of Corinne Timsit Art Advisory (CT2A) and an editor-in-chief & co-founder of ArtPremium Magazine & Corporate Art Magazine.
She has held in parallel the following positions:
-Advisor to the Governor of Puerto Rico,
-Project Manager and Curator at the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico including an exhibition of over 140 works by Jean-Michel Basquiat,
-Curator of contemporary art exhibitions at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem,
-And many more.
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