Suddenly, a blinding light. Shapes appear, move and waltz, lifted by an invisible breeze. It’s all about suppleness, angles, textures and colors. By looking closely, fragments reveal themselves: they are hair, trees, legs, architectures, blades of grass…. YOON Ji Eun’s latest works tell the story of a world admittedly cracked and floating, but a world that is also stratified, organic and cyclic. In a movement from inwards to outwards, the artist seizes images of division, separation, reshaping or even dispersion. She describes how she sometimes lets herself daydream and feels projected into space. A couple of brief instants, airy and miniscule, she is almost weightless and comes close to void and light.

Confronted with a world in transition, a reality that she cannot grasp, YOON Ji-Eun chooses to take some perspective and reacts by means of figures and shapes decomposing and immaterializing. Bi and tri-dimensionalities are not the only ones cohabitating in her drawings on papers and sculpted woods. The artist activates yet another dimension, which is both temporality and musicality. If certain compositions strike in their verticality, others are multi-focal for everything to appear undulating, shapeshifting, moving. Light and void thus create a world of possibilities. The world can transform and rise again. Grace, utopia and nothingness engage closely with each other.

Suddenly, a blinding light. Shapes appear, move and waltz, lifted by an invisible breeze. It’s all about suppleness, angles, textures and colors. By looking closely, fragments reveal themselves: they are hair, trees, legs, architectures, blades of grass…. YOON Ji Eun’s latest works tell the story of a world admittedly cracked and floating, but a world that is also stratified, organic and cyclic. In a movement from inwards to outwards, the artist seizes images of division, separation, reshaping or even dispersion. She describes how she sometimes lets herself daydream and feels projected into space. A couple of brief instants, airy and miniscule, she is almost weightless and comes close to void and light.

Confronted with a world in transition, a reality that she cannot grasp, YOON Ji-Eun chooses to take some perspective and reacts by means of figures and shapes decomposing and immaterializing. Bi and tri-dimensionalities are not the only ones cohabitating in her drawings on papers and sculpted woods. The artist activates yet another dimension, which is both temporality and musicality. If certain compositions strike in their verticality, others are multi-focal for everything to appear undulating, shapeshifting, moving. Light and void thus create a world of possibilities. The world can transform and rise again. Grace, utopia and nothingness engage closely with each other.

Notions of travels and temporality have been at the chore of YOON Ji Eun’s work for a long time. Scenes from dreams were embedded in everyday life moments, interiors, landscapes. In 2019, antique statues were part of contemporary environments (metro stations, urban architectures, rifts in the landscape), giving life to one of her fundamental concerns, our complex relation to time and reality. YOON Ji Eun felt such a presence, such life in these sculptures and thousand-year-old expressions that a bridge between these far-apart times had been built. In 2020, a residency at the Institut Français in Saint-Louis, Senegal, deeply influenced the artist. She came back struck by the discovery of a societal reality so different from what she knew, marked by the colonial past, lights and nuances she had never considered. Numerous drawings and a praxinoscope were born from this encounter under the sign of synchronicity and erosion of time. From now on, another color, a fluidity and a blur have made their way into YOO Ji-Eun’s work.

Travelling towards the unfinished marks a new chapter. YOON Ji-Eun gives space to turbulence, fragments, glimpses. The world is no longer a static and unalterable frame where one circulates in an almost cyclic manner. The world is instability, mutation, conversion and made of strata that materialize a continuity. Thus, certain drawings unveil horizontal stripes entirely covering the paper. Between these stripes, brightness pierces through, like vision between shutters. Fragile points travel across these spaces in a regular rhythm, specimen, mini-worlds and markers minutely depicted.

Elsewhere, the tunnel is a metaphor for a fractioned and split vision. Obscurity, this visual void experienced through a passage in a tunnel materializes as planes of white alternating with planes of fluid colors. Entire sheets are covered by distinct fragments.

Wood reliefs are another proposition. The medium’s discrete veins recall its organic nature. Areas with multiples colors can be read, contrasting with those drawn with a simple pencil. Vertical shapes are erected, planted like incisions in the composition’s fluidity. Their tridimensionality is even more reinforced by the raw work of the knife and gouge that suggest a pending brutality. In some places, mini-shapes of color explode, bringing a breath, a wind, a sound…

With this new ensemble of works, YOON Ji-Eun makes the promise of a poetic journey in the realms of doubt and the indefinite, and in fine, allows us to embrace a certain relinquishment in favor of a permanent potential.

Times, rituals and matter
The temporal aspects and the ceaseless repetition are the basic elements of Yoon Ji-Eun’s work. Her choice of wood and stratified wood as her favoured medium is not innocuous, for the passage of time is inscribed there in the superimposed layers as well as in the veining of the surface. Sometimes, a further layer of wood in the shape of mountains or rocks stands out in relief, reinforcing the impression that an element imposes itself on the drawn shapes. The plethora of stories as well as the fascination of Yoon Ji-Eun for the banal, daily act, make one think of Flemish painting and Breughel in particular. Even in the painting where the presence of human figures is very restricted, the concept of a community of human kind, of a link to the earth, of something original reigns. The fact that wood is employed is not alien to that concept; the idea of craft, of manual labour that digs, sculpts, brands and sketches as well…. The reference to folk art is not far as well, despite the sophistication of the work and the studied compositions – an art which mirrors ordinary life, that of rituals and days that resemble one another, an art which rejoices in the use of a multitude of colours, in the beauty of a piece of wood, engraved, sketched or sculpted. Wood accompanies Yoon Ji-Eun up to and into her works on paper: one finds it in the tree motif or else in the veined, wood coloured surfaces.

Mirages
The situations described in Yoon Ji-Eun’s work are often inspired by photographs in which she stages herself, or images she finds. They are structured around a feminine figure with blindfolds, who is none other but the artist herself. The blindfolded eyes symbolize the feeling of isolation and solitude of the young women who found herself confined with an infant, in a country which is not hers. The figure moves on in the landscapes, an empty net on its back or in the process of demarcating a mountain chain with this same net, or else in front of an open book showing different landscapes. … Is it a questioning of the notion of belonging, or the defining of a territory? Questions of identity and guidelines are underlying in Yoon Ji-Eun’s work. Elsewhere, the same figure finds itself confronted by a steep mountain with clothes on its top. One can imagine the way to be climbed before placing more clothes on the top. What is the link between the supposed task and the figure? Duty, destiny or choice? She is a modern Sisyphus faced with absurdity; she is a solitary character even in other’s company, calling to mind the art of Korean literates where the individual finds himself confronted by a grandiose landscape. The artist explains that during the elaboration of a work, the surrounding elements (mountains, paths, geometric shapes) appear before the figures as mirages. Sources of astonishment intrude, impose themselves, creating ruptures or anchorage points in the ceaseless movement of time and existence. Often the same figure is placed in different situations in the same painting. Is it a way of suggesting an evolution or hesitations? The works keep their enigma – only allowing the faceless figures the possibility of continuing their round dance, completing the same tasks, in a universe where only the environment changes.

Background
Born in 1982 in South Korea, Yoon Ji-Eun has already had many exhibitions in France where she came to complete her licence in fine arts (engraving department) started at the Hong-Ik University (Seoul) at the ENSBA (Paris) under Jean-Michel Alberola. 
In 2008, she was chosen to participate in the Prix de dessin de Pierre David David-Weil. The following year, her work is shown at Jeune création  at the CENTQUATRE, and, in 2010, she is presented at the Salon de Montrouge.  A collaboration with the Galerie Schirman & de Beaucé brings her to the FIAC (2010), the salon DRAWING NOW (2011), and in 2010, the gallery holds her monographic exhibition Les lents nuages font dormir. Recently, Yoon Ji-Eun took part in the exhibition Ce que je trouve (pas) chez elle at the Maison des arts de Créteil (2012). She is also included in the publication Des artistes dans leur monde – an overview of emerging artists in France published by La Gazette Drouot (2012).