Myself / Them is the first solo exhibition in the United States by South Korea-based artist Jin Young Yu.
Through the artist’s nearly invisible renderings of emotionally complex individuals, she dramatizes the pressures in contemporary life between how we are expected to behave versus how we really feel. With acute sensitivity, Yu explores that tension in evolving ways.
Yu achieves the invisibility of these sculpted figures through highly transparent plastic, a material that she prefers because it does not bend light the way glass and other choices would. Using a labor-intensive process done entirely by hand, Yu is able to create eerie ethereal effects for her sculptures.
“My works are about the ‘invisible people’,” she told Arrested Motion. “I wanted to talk about the stories of the people who said, ‘I definitely don’t know them, but they knew me so well. They said they worked with me for over a year. To me, that person was a transparent existence that neither did or didn’t exist.'”
“It was too simple to define them as ‘the alienated people’ or ‘the depressed people,” the artist continues. “Instead, I thought that I, or we, could easily be one of them. My works are about people who, instead of getting along with others, choose to keep a distance from them, and be invisible or be left alone unconcerned. Instead of trying to fit into the world, they climb into a space of their own and reject other people’s intrusions.”
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via [MyModMet, Arrested Motion]
