Lot 1640: YOO HYUN MI

YOO HYUN MI
(B. 1964)
Composition (Chair and 8)
chromogenic print
111 x 140 cm. (43 3/4 x 55 in.)
edition 1/3
Executed in 2009

Seoul, Korea, Mong In Art Center, Bleeding Blue, 19 November 2009-17 January 2010 (different edition exhibited).

Yoo Hyun Mi's works are a result of multiple media processes made to challenge the eye and the viewer's perception of reality. Integrating sculpture, painting and photography into each work, Yoo first crafts daily objects from clay, and then paints them elaborately, while conjuring up her own interpretation of shadow and illumination for a specific atmospheric setting. This installation is finally captured through the lens of a camera and concludes a calculated design that intends to exploit the power of photography and its ability to portray false reality.

Yoo challenges the viewer to discover and analyze the arbitrary space between reality and illusion in her images, as she kindles a strange sense of emptiness where the objects become inaccessible to us, sealed by the constant reproduction of the preliminary value of the object. Yoo further enhances the narrative complexity and philosophical musing in her images by infusing them with an element of suspense and mystery, as in Composition (Chair and 8) (Lot 1640), where an equilibrium, literal and metaphorical, may or may not be destructed. By draping unassuming objects in symbolism, Composition (Shoemaker) (Lot 1641) becomes the artist's nostalgic allusion to the classical world that has now fallen desolate, or could equally imply one that transcends. Nevertheless, this is precisely her conscious decision; they are ones that start deceptively truthful but designed to fulfill the fallacy that her artworks pose, which are ultimately a mere figment of imagination.