Yun Jeong Hong

Artist statement

Body, mind, time, space, life, and their relation are the concepts that I have kept close to myself during my studio practices.

My interest in the lives of objects manifested in a piece “preserving death and the shapes of living things - for 1793; to celebrate the birth of museum and the head of the king (2009),” at the Champaign County Historical Museum. In this work, I exhibited “Wilson collection,” a fabricated object collection with self-made identity as an Anglo-Saxon middle age man, with a backdrop of an actual historical museum collection. This collection includes Victorian-style moss terrariums; a dead fish collection in resin; skins of animals; holed hamburger patties coated with resin after having been eaten by ants; and animal porcelain collections referencing ancient Chinese taxonomy in the fiction of Borges as discussed by Foucault. This exhibition framed the primary subjects of my artworks: archaeology and taxonomy, history and fiction, gazing and being gazed at, positioning and gesture, and the life and death of things.

Following this research project and exhibition, my interest shifted towards studying the desire of creation. I began to make sculptures that embody a gesture of becoming. Made from wood scraps and resembling a staircase, my first sculpture in this series was “Episteme (2009),” I then created “Anti-Oedipus (2010),” a floor piece made from wood fragments and shredded books. As these fragments proliferate and collide with one another, their evolving configurations impart the desire to become a floor, a plat, a map, a gesture, and a record. During these practices, I considered the sculpture as a singular narrative that conveys the desire to be something. These works exist between the tensions of internal narratives (becoming/making the/a staircase) unfolding outward outside, and an external frame (the surface of the staircase) that holds the desire back into its body.

After these series of studio experiments, I was determined to know how other artists incorporate and deal with the body-mind relation via their art making methodologies. My curatorial project, “Nomadic Fantasia-Indra’s net (2011)” was about this question. I organized an exhibition and interviewed artists who are using their body as a site, studying bodily experiences as a subject matter, and exploring mind-specificity during studio practices.

While refining my art making desires, I planned two performances in 2012. In the first work, the “Oedipus; sentience scape I,” I combined site-specificity and performance by directing a dancer’s moves to enact a written script based on the story of Oedipus and relating it to the architectural elements (e.g. wall, floor) of the performance site, an old station building. In the second work, the “Time Between Dog and Wolf,” I combined a performance and installation by tarot card reading for visitors who come up to the set-up stage. By becoming a fortuneteller, I let other people be my work. After talking about personal issues, visitors donated their possessions as part of the installation and as a trace of their existence and interaction. More then 230 people participated in this project and voluntarily became the work themselves. For two weeks, I experienced how an artwork is created by connections and how a life is framed by the mind. By letting visitors listen to my advice and letting them keep their possessions on the floor, I intervened in their lives by my words.