The exhibition is part of a collaboration between the Centre Culturel Coréen, the MNAAG – Musée National des arts asiatiques – Guimet and the Galerie Maria Lund, initiated on the occasion of the Carte blanche offered to Min Jung-Yeon at the MNAAG in 2019-2020.

Min Jung-Yeon invites us to a dreamlike world which is nevertheless closely linked to our own. Her monumental and immersive installation Tissage (Weave), presented at the MNAAG in 2019-2020, dealt with memory and reconciliation in the symbolic form of a forest with unfathomable depths. Since then, her work has developed a new fluidity to evoke the perpetual movement of our reality. The free and uncontrolled gesture is intertwined with carefully drawn forms to awaken associations with the body, the landscape, the cosmos. Min Jung-Yeon’s fascination with contemporary science, including quantum physics, and traditional Asian philosophy combine here; it is a question of emptiness and fullness, of dark matter, of energy and temporality, but also of emotions.

The artist’s lived experience is interwoven with universality. Struggle is a recurring topic – that between elements of opposing natures and that of our emotions. With Désert plein – soif, sommeil, silence (Full desert – thirst, sleep, silence), Min Jung-Yeon summons a space of open perception where desire and thirst are need and drive, sleep is absence and presence, and silence one of the most intense states. The desert is full!

Min Jung-Yeon has a great mastery of drawing and painting and her current approach goes beyond a simple technical demonstration. Her expression effortlessly alternates between very meticulous drawing and more fluid, even abstract gestures.

The circuit of Désert plein – soif, sommeil, silence allows visitors to gradually enter into Min Jung-Yeon’s landscapes, until the last stage of the journey which culminates with the monumental and immersive installation Tissage which was created for the exhibition Carte blanche à Min Jung-Yeon, MNAAG – Guimet, 2019-2020. The title refers to Min Jung-Yeon’s desire for reconciliation through her work – a place where emotions and contradictory elements are expressed and battle it out between themselves. These contrasts can be found in the elements of the installation itself: organic birch trunks entangled with copper pipes and overlaid with white feathers, like the huge wings of birds. Feathers inspired by a shamanic rite of passage between worlds. Mirrors bring confusion and new visions which escape the artist’s control.

[…] Min Jung Yeon’s new works reflect a singular coherence and evolution in the artist’s production. Of course, they are part of the same attempt to reconcile and confront heterogeneous elements, at the boundary between reality and unreality. But they have shed a complex form of accumulation of shapes and colours to spawn towards something simpler, where emptiness and abstraction have taken a primordial place. Permanent control of the gesture and mental anticipation have given way to more lightness, abandon and chance. […]

Without a doubt, in these new landscapes, Min Jung Yeon is still talking about her interior worlds. But something within her has shifted. Formerly, through complexity, through saturation, there was the expression of a teeming interiority, speaking of many things at once. Now, the artist seems to have concentrated on capturing a single element, a single emotion. […]