Yujin Son

Visual Artist

Art creates bridges that connect everything,

and all boundaries disappear.

Through my work, I create a symbolic bridge that connects society. My process, which connects archiving, collecting, material creation, and artwork, acts like a bridge that guides to new horizons and perspectives. By weaving past information and facts with current issues and stories into art, I express a self and reality that is deeply intertwined with society. This is not just visual communication, but a way of life itself.

My work primarily embraces contemporary themes of 'coexistence,' spanning humans, nature, animals, social systems, and concepts. These are often illuminated through the lens of keywords like the deconstruction of concepts and purposes, the separation of systems and existence, amorphousness and reconstruction, time and life, decentralization and decolonization, combustion and traces.

To illuminate the essence of contemporaneity, I trace and gather objects as an evidence and the echoes of issues around my community. With fire, I 'transform' them. Transformation, for me, is liberation from the law of equivalent exchange, like the commodification of nature. These collected entities interact with me, reshaped into new forms, established connections and relationships, much like forming new roots.

By burning and reshaping materials, I create installations in atypical way, often employing hand-crafted charcoal to depict fact-based narratives restructured in a unique, irreproducible manner. The act of burning holds profound significance in Eastern cultures, serving as a means of honoring and comforting the subject. This transformation expresses both origin and a deep-seated yearning and desire.

I propose and challenge new perspectives on the existing notions, systems, and purposes related to existence. Ultimately, this becomes a form of record, a path to gradual, meaningful change in our lives. By reversing and reconfiguring the materiality of substances collected from real spaces, I question the values and subjectivity of our lives in a fluid, atypical manner.