Désert plein, soif, sommeil, silence
Min Jung-Yeon
Centre Culturel Coréen
29.11.2022 > 11.03.2022
Presentation
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.
Ce qui reste
The exhibition is accompanied by a text by the art critic and curator Amélie Adamo. Here is an excerpt:
[…] 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. […]
Agenda
TALK
Thursday 02.03.2023
7:30pm
Korean Cultural Center
20 rue de la Boétie, 75008 Paris
VISITS of the exhibition Désert plein, soif, sommeil, silence
with Min Jung-Yeon
Saturday, February 11th - 11:00pm
Saturday, February 11th - 2:30pm
Korean Cultural Center
20 rue de la Boétie, 75008 Paris
Press
Publications and texts
MEET | Min Jung-Yeon
for “carte blanche” to Min Jung-Yeon – MNAAG – Musée Guimet, Paris, 2019-2020
Mais le paysage est encore là
Min Jung-Yeon
27.01 > 18.03.2022
Presentation
An all time metaphor, Min Jung-Yeon’s landscapes evolve with her.
Her work took on a new fluidity and a powerful gesturality with the creation of her monumental installation Tissage, which was presented at the MNAAG – Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet in 2019-2020. An energy was released and now contributes its impetus, sometimes violent, sometimes like a gentle exhalation. The compositions, once entirely thought out, now go with the flow, closely coexisting with the thoroughness of which the artist is capable. Opposites and their struggles, recurring subjects in her work, have melted into an intimate embrace, if not a face-off.
In the past, round edges and angles clashed in dense compositions. Henceforth, the artist’s work conveys a more pacified sensation: the relationship between matter and void presents a new balance.
Min Jung-Yeon creates to better erase and recreate. Brush strokes, prints, fluid materials of diluted acrylic on canvas. In this process, fossilised times accumulate and overlap: Skeletons, rocks, visions and dreams appear in perspectives which are often strange. Amongst her landscapes, we find those of her childhood in the Korean countryside, those glimpsed or dreamed, or those anchored in her visual memory, including the imaginary landscapes of Ahn Gyeon, a great figure of fifteenth-century Korean art.
Reality is a dream, and dream becomes reality. The seasons pass, the emotions surge forth; lights and thoughts come and go. The intense hues, powerful contrasts and mirages of summer give way to autumn, and occasionally to nostalgia. The landscape is experienced from within, the sun becomes scarcer, spring is still only a promise. The memory we were looking for is lost, leaving behind only matter, colour, gesture… The eyes scrutinise, forms stand out and manifest themselves: cliffs, stalactites, stalagmites and suddenly a line, a drip, or a flat area of colour impose themselves. The works are presented to us in a frontal, almost scenic and horizontal way, but they also display a verticality, that of strata. Thus Min Jung-Yeon establishes a temporality: her own.
In pictures
Agenda
TALK
Thursday 02.03.2023
7:30pm
Korean Cultural Center
20 rue de la Boétie, 75008 Paris
VISITS of the exhibition Désert plein, soif, sommeil, silence
with Min Jung-Yeon
Friday, January 27th - 4:45pm
Saturday, January 28th - 2:30pm
Korean Cultural Center
20 rue de la Boétie, 75008 Paris
Press
Publications and texts
MEET | Min Jung-Yeon
for “carte blanche” to Min Jung-Yeon – MNAAG – Musée Guimet, Paris, 2019-2020
Min Jung-Yeon
difficile d'accepter la réalité
Min Jung-YeonDifficile d'accepter la réalité
Encre de Chine et acrylique sur papier
40,4 x 32,5 cm
2020
Ref. K17165
Demande d'information sur l'œuvre :
Min Jung-YeonDifficile d'accepter la réalité
Indian ink and acrylic on paper
40,4 x 32,5 cm
2020
Ref. K17165
Request for information on the artwork :
Min Jung-Yeon
Passage de l'air
Min Jung-YeonPassage de l'air
encre de Chine et crayon de couleur sur papier
33,4 x 28,7 cm
2020
REF. K17197
Demande d'information sur l'œuvre :
Min Jung-YeonPassage de l'air
Indian ink and colour pencil on paper
33,4 x 28,7 cm
2020
REF. K17197
Request for information on the artwork :
Min Jung-Yeon
Somewhere
Min Jung-YeonSomewhere
encre de chine, crayon de couleur et acrylique sur papier
40,6 x 53,8 cm
2020
REF. K17192
Demande d'information sur l'œuvre :
Min Jung-YeonSomewhere
Indian ink, colour pencil and acrylic on paper
40,6 x 53,8 cm
2020
REF. K17192
Request for information on the artwork :
Min Jung-Yeon
Somewhere 3
Min Jung-YeonSomewhere 3
encre de Chine, crayon de couleur et acrylique sur papier
37,5 x 48,5 cm
2020
REF. K17191
Demande d'information sur l'œuvre :
Min Jung-YeonSomewhere 3
Indian ink, colour pencil and acrylic on paper
37,5 x 48,5 cm
2020
REF. K17191