Exhibition Information

Exhibition view

(Source = Space Willing and Dealing)

Exhibition view

(Source = Space Willing and Dealing)

Exhibition view

(Source = Space Willing and Dealing)

Exhibition view

(Source = Space Willing and Dealing)

			
The visual artist Yoon Kalim (born in 1980) has observed and explored various cultures, technologies, environments, and senses, and has suggested structures or contactable media that obscure the boundaries between users and viewers. To achieve this, the artist has diligently acquired the highest level of craftsmanship in historically significant products derived from cultural phenomena such as carpentry, traditional embroidery, baking, and traditional cuisine. By integrating these inherited skills with contemporary art, she has sought to hybridize and restructure forms and concepts within the format of projects or exhibition mediums.
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In 2016, through her solo exhibition "Three Types," the artist engaged in baking within the exhibition space, distributed the baked goods to the audience, and used them as a basis to create furniture, thereby creating a hybrid space that collided with the boundaries between everyday life and exhibition media. At the same time, she proposed an extension of the furniture forms created as artworks, incorporating origami, which allowed the physical environment of the exhibition to be reconstructed as a space where viewers could directly touch and experience it.
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In 2019, at the Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen, as part of the Korea-Denmark exchange exhibition "The Way a Hare Transforms into a Turtle" Yoon Kalim conducted a workshop in which she made traditional Korean dish ‘Dasik’. Using local ingredients to supplement diminishing Korean materials which she brought for few days of workshop, she enabled Danes who experienced and learned about Korean culture through Korean ingredients and tools to attempt cross-cultural fusion on their own.
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In her 2021 solo exhibition "Tactile Hours," the artist juxtaposed Korean traditional embroidery techniques and normative representation formats with Western botanical ingredients or added her own imagined color embroidery to animal illustrations from an 18th-century British encyclopedia, attempting collaborative art transcending time and space between visual artists.
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The works presented at the solo exhibition "Amid her golden path" at Space Willing N Dealing from November 9th to December 9th, 2023 are projects that expand the artist’s 2013 "Domestication" series. The upcoming <Camouflage> series has taken pictures from the 'Life Nature Library' section from an encyclopedia-style book called 'Time Life Books'. Each scene shows the form of life in which various mammals, insects, and birds survive through visual mimicry and camouflage in wild nature. Their visual environment is black and white. They use light reflection to avoid enemies or camouflage their appearance by using patterns and shapes in their surroundings. At some point, the artist embodies the perspective of the being that she is looking at to locate these animals. The embroidery or gold powder pigment used in the previous work was replaced with gold leaf in this new series. The artist treats gold by placing it point by point on the mesh of the enlarged print, which is considered to be similar to the technique of embroidering the texture of the cloth done by the previous working technique. At the same time, majored in sculpture, she considers the result made in the process of attaching the adhesive and glue on the pigments is no different from building a sculptural lump.
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Gold, a material Yoon Kalim deals with, also symbolizes for her the historical and cultural values that individuals want to find as well as the consideration of the values of life they pursue and lead. Gold, as a mineral, possesses economic value. In addition, it is also a being who produces and implies symbolic meanings in various fields such as society, art, and culture for a long time. This material gives Yoon Kalim a unique curiosity to explore the prototype of life, was naturally used in the form of thread, powder, and leaf in various works.
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​Yoon Kalim says, "The handcrafted element is almost every reason to work because the process itself gives me great pleasure and is also a process of putting my mind into the material." She acquires techniques from master craftsmen with the highest skills and presents them in her own unique way in her work. This approach not only reflects the joy of the learning process but also emphasizes the importance of embracing a culture of researching cultural content that can be integrated into it. Instead of vague anxieties about the future, Yoon Kalim, driven by curiosity, seeks to discover new things, and the new world she presents will offer a different perspective on the everyday life we have observed and recognized.

(Source = Space Willing and Dealing)