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| “Untitled” (2020) by Yi Hwan-kwon / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh |
By Park Han-sol
A gray-haired man in striped pajamas stretches his arms in front of a window after a good night’s sleep. It looks like the typical beginning to an uneventful day. But there’s something striking, even eerie, about him that immediately grabs viewers’ attention.
The dark shadow that should have been created on the ground by his torso is replaced by a flat and impossibly long pair of legs.
This distorted portrait that sits somewhere between 2D and 3D space is one of 10 eye-catching pieces on display in sculptor Yi Hwan-kwon’s solo exhibition at Gallery Yeh in Gangnam District, southern Seoul.
Inspired by the way old cathode-ray tube TV monitors create distortions and dynamic variations in depicting human bodies, the 47-year-old artist has developed his signature oeuvre of sculptures with exaggeratedly flat and extended bodies since early 2000s.
At this exhibition, his newly featured works have further evolved into incorporating the theme of shadows ― specifically what the artist calls, “imaginary shadows that cannot be found in reality.”
The elongated sculptures partially stuck along the walls, the ground and the staircase of the gallery all capture the artist’s family members and colleagues carrying on with their everyday lives as they clean the house, dry their hair and drink a cup of milk.
Within each sculpture, the figure’s peculiar “shadow” piques viewers’ curiosity with its flattened shape that resembles a dark silhouette but nonetheless has hyper-realistic colors and details. Indeed, his artistic mission is to explore more freely the boundary between the reality and the illusion.
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| Yi’s “Untitled” (2020) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh |
Walking around the gallery can be a puzzling yet intriguing experience for many, as viewers may continually mistake the sculptures for people at an initial glance. And even when we come to realize that the pieces cannot possibly be real, there’s something that feels inexplicably human within them. The whole viewing experience itself then becomes a physical exploration of what is real and what is fake or imagined.
“Up until now, I’ve been creating my works in order to find some kind of meaning within them, but as time has passed, I have realized that it’s incredibly difficult to do that,” Yi said at the gallery.
“I then started comparing my works to shadows, as things that can be seen but in the end, do not contain anything in their essence, until a thought crossed my mind: what if the realities that we see are another form of shadow?”
His shadowlike sculptures pose an interesting, age-old question about the fleeting nature of time and of our reality.
The exhibition runs through July 31 at Gallery Yeh.
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| Yi’s “Unknown” (2019) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh |
Shadowlike sculptures that sit between reality and illusion
Source: Buhay Kapa PH
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