Moments when ordinary objects slip out of their familiarity-when a pile of rubber bands looks like pasta, or when a soaked cardboard box breaks apart like the texture of food—Yiyoung pays attention to these subtle transitions in which things reveal properties of other materials or senses. Where her gaze lingers, the senses intersect and overlap. Visual perception slides into touch, taste, and smell; objects cease to be fixed substances and are momentarily transformed into trembling, floating something. Yiyoung connects this mingling of the senses to sculptural thinking, tracing the surface of its possibilities. For her, sculpture is a process of retracing the moment when objects begin to waver, and a study of materiality that unfolds through expanded perception rather than a reproduction of a single moment. In her interaction with the objects, she searches for elements that awaken particular sensations and shares moments of kindred perception. Through this rethinking of material properties, her sculpture emerges not as the production of static objects, but as an assemblage of living and moving possibilities.

Pondering these possibilities, Yiyoung flexibly transforms images that arise from her consciousness. The multi-sensory perception expressed in her work reminds us of the uncertainty and subjectivity of the senses. It evokes countless materials that may or may not have existed-an act akin to participating in a world where matter is alive and in motion. As this act of such participation, the exhibition Lines shows the process through which the artist Yiyoung and materials respond to each other and open a path together. On this path, we drift while exploring the distance between one another, repeating moments of coming together or falling apart within a loosely intertwined sense of distance.

It recalls the two lines that Tim Ingold drew in Making(2013). Like the traces left by two people walking side by side, each line can be seen as a path of movement-one as the sensuous stream of consciousness, the other as the circulating and intermingling flow of matter. Making, then, is a process in which material and the artist are corresponding, and carving out a path together. In this process, objects no longer remain fixed. If matter is a constellation of potential that reveals its properties depending on circumstance rather than something simply to be manufactured, then Yiyong’s studio becomes a kitchen of sensing-where she attunes to the possibilities between herself and the material through their mutual resonance. Her sculpture arises between the two lines, in the gap between them. In the transitional process-thinking of pasta while mixing plaster, imagining rubber bands while touching pasta-those slipping moments flow together with the material.

Now, we come to realize that the objects we encounter every day are never static. They may only be understood after fully sensing the gaps between them-through the process of flowing and intertwining like lines, or at times of twisting the lines that stand side by side. Thus, rather than understanding making—sculpture—as a horizontal arrangement placed side by side, let us rotate it ninety degrees and let it flow along with matter according to the process. The moment when a still object brushes against another is a moment of escape from the familiar, and fixed world. Just before entering the mold, within the falling gap, countless possibilities come into resonance. The two lines follow each other, carving a path together—consciousness and sensation, matter and thing—side by side, sometimes crossing.

Text by Soojeong Hwang

Translation by Chomin Park

Supported by Seoul Foundation for Art and Culture