Desire is the underlying theme of all of Yoo Hye-Sook’s work. She reveals this fundamental and animal-like desire in each of the mundane objects she chooses to study with the painstaking attention to detail that is her trademark. Someone’s hair, underwear, a fur coat become more than their physical incarnation to become sensuous and intriguing specimens, even veering toward eeriness. In other works that tend towards abstraction works, desire turns into a destructive force. The artist uses pencil like a dagger to pierce through Hanji, an extremely thin traditional Korean paper. Bewilderment ensues: cosmic system or microscopic view ? Fragment or Grand All ? With an economy of means (pencil, paper, canvas and space), Yoo Hye-Sook has instinctively given shape to an interrogation that characterises all her work: how to make visible the ‘other reality’ that lies beneath?