| RINA
YOON
For Rina Yoon, drawing is her “entry to
the interior life.” When she draws, her images are not
preconceived and she uses the process of drawing to understand
her relationship to her childhood self. Yoon has few memories
of her childhood in Korea and relocating to the United States
as a high school student further blocked her connection to her
past.
Over
the past five or six years, Yoon has made a series of large
drawings and prints in an attempt to communicate with her childhood
self. The mixed media drawings, although not a literal narrative,
show the gradual evolution of her relationship with her child-self.
In Unseen, a solitary adult figure fills the space,
her hands covering her eyes – a visual metaphor of being
unable to see, but also a gesture of grief. Layered within the
figure are branches, roots and seed-like forms, again metaphors
of the longing to be closer to her origins, her roots and indicative
of the beginning, the seed.
Using
spatially confusing layers is a technique that Yoon uses in
Balancing Lesson, as well as her other work. Again, a large
adult figure dominates the center, the hands lowered, more open,
but now a sketchy child’s figure emerges from the upper
left. The child seems to be situated on a floating, diagonal
plane, while the adult is in front. They’re not “on
the same plane” – there’s no significant contact
– yet they are in the same frame. This fragmentation of
space serves to deny them access to each other, however. The
skewing of traditional perspective – we look up and down
simultaneously – also indicates the chasm.
In
Balancing Lesson II, the child-self is front and center
and is more fully realized with facial and clothing details.
A shadowy adult-self hovers around the child, bending over with
arms outstretched, as if a try at embracing the child was miscalculated
and missed. While the figures are in closer proximity, the shifting
layers and perspectives still keep them from being truly in
relationship.
The
much-desired reunion seems to occur in Reconnecting,
the adult-self’s arm embracing the child-self. Still,
ambiguity reigns – this arm could be the child’s
arm too, and the adult head appears in the motion of looking
away. While the embracing gesture is strong, the figures feel
typically ungrounded in an ambiguous landscape.
In
her print series, Mapping the Body, Yoon presents life-sized
figures that continue her theme of examining the connection
between her past and present selves. More grounded than the
drawn figures, these figures seem to be collecting memories
and using them to reconstitute and transform the body itself.
Yoon’s
work visually evokes the experience of memory in its non-linearity
and its ambiguous and simultaneous qualities. Her working process
also supports this experience – Yoon solves problems by
manipulating her materials and through her physical involvement
as she works with the drawing on the wall and on the floor,
not by thinking about it or using words. This working process
is the process of the psyche itself, as Yoon seeks to excavate
her child-self to better understand her adult-self. Since she
began this project, she has noticed “a huge difference
in how I feel then and now. I feel more connected with myself
through the work.”
We
are invited to participate directly in this process in Yoon’s
most recent installation, Process of Reconciliation.
Long, narrow, translucent sheets of paper are suspended side-by-side,
making a spiraling corridor. The sheets are printed, lightly
at the entrance, with body shapes and textures. These elements
gradually increase in saturation to an intense, all-over red
at the center of the spiral. We cannot imagine the intensity
of the center as we enter the installation, but can only experience
it as we are drawn in, deeper and deeper to the interior. Yoon
sees the psyche as “a mechanism that bridges the gap between
outer and inner,” and she honors us by showing the intense
nature of the struggle as we allow the psyche to draw us inward.
NANCY
ROBINSON | KAREN WILCOX | MICHAL
SAGAR
Figure
& Psyche Homepage
|
Balancing
Lesson II, 2002, charcoal, graphite, ink, collage
Unseen II, 2001, collagraph, monotype
Process of Reconciliation, 2004, 12 panels
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