Exhibition Information

Ye Eun Min Solo Exhibition: Unpredictable invisibility
2019

Ye Eun Min Solo Exhibition: Unpredictable invisibility
2019

Ye Eun Min Solo Exhibition: Unpredictable invisibility
2019

			Ye Eun Min addresses the unease, contradictions, dispersion, and interference that arise from being in between two disparate cultures. Having spent substantial periods of her life in Korea and in France, Min is especially interested in breaking or disrupting the disquieting and incongruous aspects of living with different cultural identities. As much as many of us experience a dramatic alienation and are adrift and without alliances, we also refuse to ally ourselves, to belong. Contemporary life is life as ceaseless vacillation between communal life or individuality and belonging or alienation.

A key focus for Min is hybridity and the sense of cultural unbelonging she has personally experienced. The hybridity arising from linguistic and cultural processes is reinterpreted within the larger frame of Min’s main theme, namely ‘mixed-blood thought’. Space, time, language, relationships, materials, matter – the myriad entities that relate and interact and impact with and upon one another to form a lateral structure as opposed to a hierarchical order. What are unpredictable, uncertain, ambiguous, accidental interactions and transformations, by creating a social language and appropriate realms of shared culture, blur the existing social frame through hybridity. Min embodies this realm ambiguously through installations seemingly breaking away from socially-defined nation, race, ethnic groups, rules and duties, and in which inside and outside appear reversed.

The work exhibited in this solo show, Unpredictable Invisibility, captures the largely unseen process of such a mixing, or miscegenation, of cultural entities. This invisible mixing is given visible form through the material co-mingling of objects. The installations focus in particular on space and time, and play on the meanings and forms of specific objects, whether the moon or a cremation urn, or the inner and outer spaces of a house. Individual entities are materially, visibly partitioned and recreated to form new, unpredictable connections.

Min collects discarded, second-hand objects via online communities, then presents these clocks, lights, various items of furniture, without mention of their previous owners by lining them up in anonymous rows. In Lavihamahamahyunchuchuhappyj33atomausepponssugizetteblack-byungddoungkkeong... Min expands the concept of house as dwelling space to explore our connections with its fourth dimension. These are then dismantled, and the fragmented parts, such as ceilings divorced from walls and floors, are installed in the exhibition space. Wallpaper or light fixtures tell us that this is a fragment of a ceiling; this space is then filled up with the collected items. The title of the piece combines the online nicknames used by the previous owners of these items. This communal realm, recreated from an aggregate of anonymous lives rather than one individual one, creates a space of diversity and hybridity within the gallery as viewers move around and amid the installation and the switching on and off of lights.

Sahk(Lunar Conjunction) is an installation piece that gives visual expression to the passage of time through the various alignments of Earth, Moon, and Sun. Lunar conjunctions, also known as new Moon, occur when Earth, Moon, and Sun form a straight line with the Moon between the two other bodies, making the Moon invisible from Earth. It is a visual phenomenon that is relational. The new Moon is visible as a thin crescent after it is conjunct with the Sun; Min uses compressed plastic to represent this visible manifestation of the temporary overlap. The four highly compressed Sahk speak to interaction and relativity through metaphorical reckoning rather than through the calculations of time, distance, and space.