Art between Home and the Public
Interpreting art and taste in connection with a specific gender would be liable to criticism that it is anachronistic today. Particularly when it comes to gender sensitivity of the new generation called a generation of Kim Ji-youngs (referring to the novel “Kim Ji-young, Born 1982”) the stereotyping of gender roles and gender dichotomy are dismantled fast and even radically. However, an excessively rapid change of awareness seems to bring about many side effects. The rise of conflict between genders shows it. In the Western feminist art of the 1970s, gender-specific elements were employed as part of the work in many cases. The French visual artist Annette Messager is an exemplary case. Her husband Christian Boltanski was an installation artist, who occupied a powerful position in the art world of the 1990s. Messager, who worked quite humbly compared to her famous husband, said she usually worked in the kitchen. She used the place in which the highest intensity of labor took place as her studio space. Her work in those days utilizing craft techniques such as sewing and knitting can be seen as an attempt to appropriate the convention in which society confines women to certain spaces, occupations and roles rather than as an intention to show the inequality between space and gender. The artist not only visualizes the desire of women that are not permitted in society, but also confuses the hierarchy between craft and art by moving household activities into art activities. Therefore, for Messager, the kitchen was a place for creation, helping her regain freedom as well as a place of appropriation where subversion into social space takes place. Behind her craft-like and deskilled work is her longtime interest in ‘outsider art’ (disability art) including art by those suffering from mental illness, children and amateurs, which is also notable. In 2005, Messager was invited as the first female artist representing France at the Venice Biennale and won the Golden Lion Award the same year. Her work then, in which Pinnochio was a metaphor for Casanova, was based on an interpretation that the lacks between two beings — the desire to be a human and endless indulgence in women — are related to maternal affection.

The Process of Learning and Sharing
Kalim Yoon has developed works of sculpture and performance based on household activities mainly imposed on women, including cooking for rituals, baking and embroidery. Her work reminds us of the point of contact with ‘relational aesthetics.’ Relational aesthetics in contemporary art has created a dynamic of seeing the convention of the field of art, the existing artist-centered topography, from a new perspective. On the other hand, however, there are also some critical views that view relational aesthetics as overly optimistic and romantically dramatized socially engaged art. As a matter of fact, the concept of a ‘relation’ as suggested by Nicolas Bourriaud, the author of Relational Aesthetics, was closer to invert Modernist aesthetics, which made a division of space between everyday life and fine art as well as life and art. He did not suggest looking at art as a temporary means of simply bridging the gap in a destroyed community or interpreting various relations established in this way with a romantic narrative. Modernist aesthetics makes a distinction between the past and the present, thereby creating another notion and myth that Modernist art is something new, an evolved form of art. There may have been some complaints about the history in which European formalism devoted to realizing the ideal, not reality, for a long time behind this change of awareness. Bourriaud intended to change the attitudes of understanding art from an evolutionary perspective in the linear view of history through relational aesthetics. Accordingly, the concept of relations can be regarded as a suggestion that the art of each era be observed in association with the ethos of the time, rather than in distinction or separation from particular times. As mentioned previously, Yoon’s work is very reminiscent of relational aesthetics. What is especially impressive is that a series of processes belong to the processes of learning before the objectives of work. And it forms the basis of creation, which is inevitable in her work.

Dr.Bernett’s Useful Plants-Garlic, 2019, embroideries on silk, 19x28cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

For Yoon, learning is not something of an academic dimension. Sewing and handcraft in which she has been continuously learned also demonstrate it. When she was studying abroad, a person from Denmark told her that her work would be well received in Denmark and suggested a residency there. Thanks to this chance meeting she had the opportunity to stay in Denmark and learn Danish handcraft. During the course of learning Western embroidery she became familiar with Danish culture. It is as if learning itself becomes a purpose rather than the process of learning points to a certain goal. In other words, Yoon’s learning is close to relationship established based on embroidery. Learning traditional Korean embroidery after coming back to Korea, Yoon comes to know the difference between Eastern and Western embroidery. To borrow the words of the artist, the objects and formats of Korean embroidery are fixed in comparison to Western embroidery. But this method does not become a problem. She says that learning embroidery at a workshop altogether on a regular basis is close to collaboration completed by all providing support for one rather than making personal work. In this way the process of learning involves a sharing of minds beyond the process of merely transferring techniques. This specifically points to the direction of Yoon’s world of art. With the 21st century ahead, relational aesthetics was well-known as a mode of artistic practice across the globe. This concept tended to be exaggerated or distorted as an artistic activity for a public goal, while being politically employed — unlike the intention of the author Bourriaud. On the other hand, Yoon attempts to eliminate the hierarchy between art and craft as well as creation and technology, and place more meaning on a simple community, the joy of everyday life and pleasure of sharing through the certain modes of expression instead of aiming at the objectives of political attitudes or social participation.

Goymsang Installation. Burnett’s Plants, 2019, embroidery on silk, copper frame, 40x170cm 4pcs. Goymsang (고임상), 2019, Korean traditional sweets, copper plates, dimension variable.

To show minds
Yoon’s recent works show a tendency of emphasizing the hybridity of crossover with different cultures. Goymsang (2019), installing foods for traditional rites of passage and traditional Korean craft folding screens, was introduced at Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen, Denmark. Nikolaj Kunsthal is an art center created by renovating the former St. Nicholas Church built in the 13th century with an emphasis on its architectural style. Whether in the East or the West, a religious space is closely related to the human life cycle and can be compared to a knot connecting individuals, families, regions and society. In the days when religion was the foundation of life, a rite of passage of individuals may have been a practice having a meaning on a social level beyond the borders of faith. Kalim Yoon does not use ‘tradition’ as just a way of emphasizing a formal method or cultural identity. Instead, she presents daily lives commonly given to all as a discourse. As the value of the rite of passage, which was ritualized in traditional society, fades away, the rite of passage in contemporary times seems to collude with consumerism. In fact, traditional rites as a cultural pattern cannot avoid criticism for taking women’s housework for granted. Yoon appears to deal with femininity and household activities as a process with heart and meaning without seeing them from a strictly feminist perspective. Therefore, what she questions through her work is not the meaning of tradition and its cultural prototype, but the commemoration of time, thereby presenting minds.

Exhibition view of Tactile Hours. (clockwise) Chryseus:Greyhound Dhole, Hybrid ass and Zebra, The Grim, Dhole, 2021, Embroidery on steel engraving Plate, from 『The Naturalist’s Library』 by Sir William Jardine c.1843, 42x45cm each. Image courtesy of the artist.

Felis Nepalensis:Nepaul Cat, 2021, Embroidery on steel engraving Plate 23, from 『The Naturalist’s Library』 by Sir William Jardine c.1843, 42x45cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

In her solo exhibition Tactile Hours (Space Willing N Dealing) in 2021, she presents works of embroidery on the forms of animals found in old illustration books. She has continued a collage of embroidery since 2008 and in this exhibition, Yoon explores how the human imagination appearing on the border between reality and imagination reproduces the images of animals through the icons of animal forms. The artist says she felt that the images of animals appearing in illustrations looked somehow bare. Then she elaborately adds volume and texture to the images as if transplanting fur on the simply described drawings, using gold and silver threads that are often used in Korean embroidery, while utilizing the method of Western embroidery that she has steadily learned. Just like caressing the body, Tactile Hours, the title of the exhibition, reflects the attitudes of the artist before academic concepts such as cultural hybridity and aesthetics of intersection. Experience of touching dolls and conveying feelings to objects in childhood and the process of embroidering and sewing lines of poems are a time of reading and adjusting text with hands. Therefore, Yoon’s art is coordinated on a simple and ordinary scale, like handy paperbacks. Sewing is an aesthetics of touch. Scars left after the sharp needle penetrates through the fabric lead to the process of adding new forms and letters. This simple act by one’s fingertips is not just intended to extend the life of an object or to engrave nice patterns. In this process we can not only express our minds of caring for an object as an existence, but also leave a little trace that allows us to know this relationship on it.

※ This content was first published in 『2021 SeMA Nanji Residency Program Catalogue』, and re-published here with the consent of SeMA Nanji Residency.

Jung Hyun

JUNG Hyun obtained his Ph. D. degree from Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris with a dissertation on the “Relationships between the artist’s identity and the work”. He works as an art critic and independent curator. Through art criticism integrated with cultural research, he uses criticism as a means for learning, and considers curatorial practice a new method of knowledge production and a major research activity. His main publications include 《Global Art Market Critique》(Paju: Mimesis, 2016, co-authored),《Ready-Made Reality: Junebum Park’s Use of Videos》 (Seoul: Arts Council Korea, 2015), and 《Curatorial Discourse Practice》(Seoul: Hyunsil book, 2014, co-authored); curated the exhibition 《BODY MATTERS: Arts as Discourse, Performativity, Representation》 (Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, 2016), and 《Time’s Underscore_The Republic of Korea’s 50 Years Seen Through the JoongAng Ilbo’s Images: 1965-2015》(Seoul Arts Center Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, 2015). He is currently a professor in the Department of Fine Arts of the College of Art and Sports at Inha University.