Kyung Youl Yoon
Artist Statement - Cubic Inception
1. Cubic Inceptions means a cube’s beginning or that Kyung Youl Yoon’s cube will start something. It is the experience of meeting the object directly with body and mind. If painting can be said to be an illusion that represents something as its resemblance, my work is the thing itself and meeting with reality directly. Cubist paintings are illusion of objects but not objects themselves. By sharing a direction experience rather than an interpretation, explanation, or kind enlightenment of what is a painting, the artist and the viewer can form a relationship at certain point.
2. Secondly, as the artwork is made of big and small cubes it can achieve multiple visions. Based on angle of multiple visions and layers and based on the depth and height the work can look and be seen differently. The big and small aluminum cubes undergo fusion and fission to create forms that appear varyingly to the viewers based on their individual differences. For example, one can have different experiences and thoughts just as the aerial view of the city, the small stars in the night sky, and the numerous rocks on the seashore appear differently based on the viewers’ uniqueness.
3. The numerous aluminum cubes within the work form infinity. Looking into infinity, one psychologically experiences a metastasis. The infinite leads to eternity, dream, imagination, reason, and spiritual. When the cubes exhibit the traits as they are, whether those traits are the variation of size, the wrinkling, the damaging, the luminescent qualities, and the imperfections, and when these things create harmony themselves, this itself can be said to be beauty and freedom.
4. Our sense of worth is divided into the useful and the unneeded, and the things without use are discarded as waste. When we regard the discarded things or think differently, we can see the things that we couldn’t see before, feel newness, and erase the boundaries of binary opposition. The aluminum containers were discarded after just single use. Waste was revived and became an artwork. This can be said to be a wonder. Changes occur, and the environment changes when we look and think differently. By expanding our line of sight beyond what is currently visible to us, we can think of broad freedom and infinite possibilities. My work can be seen through each person’s individual discernment and perspective.
Additional Info:
Bio:
Kyung Youl Yoon (b. 1947) is a Korean American artist, currently dedicating his practice to the ‘Cubic Inception’ series of sculptural paintings. Cubic Inception began as a response both to global climate change and to the alienation of contemporary urban life. He began adding sculptural elements to his paintings to '“break the indifference of onlookers,” as he has written, “to create an exchange where the viewer begins to reflect on a new thought or idea that eliminates obscurity in the forms and creates personal meaning.” The individual pieces become a large matrix of cubes forming a collection of ideas. Each cubic piece takes the place of a brushstroke. Each edge takes the place of a line. The resulting masses of shapes suggest aerial views of industrial landscapes, articulated topographies of beautiful but implicitly hostile environments. The Cubic Inception paintings brim with both metaphorical resonance and tactile allure. Los Angeles-based critic and curator, Peter Frank, notes that the Cubic Inception paintings “extend Yoon’s painterly practice into sculpture, into a low relief of a kind that cannot logically be derived from painting.
Yoon studied at the University of Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain and held numerous exhibitions in the United States, Korea, China, and Spain since the 1980s, including the Shanghai Li Haisu Museum, Public Naeseorak Art Museum Korea, Seoul Arts Center, Madrid National University of Spain, Queens Museum, and the Art Gallery at the Rockefeller State Park Preserve. In 2015, Yoon, held a solo exhibition titled “Journey” at the United Gallery in Korea, and he was also invited to exhibit his works at Encounter Korea at the Southern Utah Museum of Art (SUMA) and the Project of First Encounter at the Korean Culture Center in Los Angeles, California. Notably, his recent works were shown in a solo exhibition at the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery. He is also represented by the Donghwa Ode Gallery, through which he participated in the Art New York/Art Miami/Aspen/Art Palm Springs Art Fairs, and Hamptons Art Fair. He also exhibited at the Passion Connected 100 x 100 - Pyeong Chang Olympic 2018 Event, the Asia Week Special Exhibition, A Wave of Peace from the World Korean Cultural Center in New York, and many other venues.
A2022.005 Cubic Inception Series, Aluminum, Gold, and Mixed Media on Canvas, 40 x 60 inches, 2022
A2022.006 Cubic Inception Series, Aluminum, Gold, and Mixed Media on Canvas, 50 x 70 inches, 2022
AC2022.003 Cubic Inception Series, Acrylic and Mixed Media on Canvas, 60 x 80 inches, 2022