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In 1967, thinker and social theorist Michel Foucault delivered a seminal lecture outlining the idea of heterotopia. In Foucault’s view, a heterotopia is a “place with no place,” an area by which societal norms are each distorted and distilled, each mirrored and transgressed. Amongst these heterotopias, Foucault named prisons, brothels, bars, cinemas, colonies and ships. Practically half a century later, the artist Yunghun Yoo recognized yet one more heterotopia: the discursive Southern California transportation system.
Anybody who has ever had the fortune and the fortitude to journey Southern California by means of practice will acknowledge—if solely temporally—the heterotopia that Yoo encircles inside his lately closed solo exhibition, “Union Station.” With gestural vigor, Yoo renders the slowgoing transfers, the phantom platforms, the eastward abyss, the detours to nowhere cities and the lengthy, circuitous routes that should move a couple of times by way of Union Station tracks like blood by way of coronary arteries.
“My work (of trains) are extra areas than beings of transportation,” Yoo advised Observer. “I used to be excited about this concept of juxtaposing one world inside one other world.”
The spatial ordinance of 839 gallery—habituated within the Hollywood bungalow of gallery house owners Liz Hirsch and Joshua Smith—enhanced the thesis of Yoo’s work. Trains of thought hover over the kitchen sink, railway alerts beside an empty phone area of interest. Adjoining to the decommissioned hearth and throughout from the report console was Exit Wound, a sweep of yellow blotted with smears of shade, unmoored by ranging striations. Yoo defined that he was portray his interpretation of a gunshot wound—with patches of bruising, an undulating suture mounted on the canvas’s middle, rivulets of technicolored blood spiraling out towards an considerable edge. Exit Wound additionally bears a hanging resemblance to a bleeding panorama or a ruptured infrastructure or perhaps a practice that’s gone off the rails.
“I used to be making an attempt to explain the thought of parting with one thing,” Yoo defined. “Like one thing that’s going by way of you has this ache, and it leaves a mark.”
Within the hallway was the unassuming but mystifying piece 8 (2). It’s a small work with two columns of 4 nebulous spheres sure collectively by faint ligatures of shade. They characterize platform assignments, which in Southern California are topic to transpositions or reconfiguration or instantaneous expirations. Yoo experiments with opacity within the exhibition, ensnaring the ephemerality of practice rides by blighting out loud swathes and strokes into quiet implications. 8 (2) suggests a connection however doesn’t affirm it; it guarantees no reassurance that your practice will arrive or that it’ll take you any nearer to your vacation spot as soon as it does.
“The concept of connecting the 2 platforms collectively looks like a fantasy,” Yoo elaborated, “as a result of while you’re on a practice, you’re continually going away from one place to a distinct place, however however, you’re on this bodily monitor.”
Throughout the exhibition, some moments have been summary whereas others have been way more tangible. Prepare II and Prepare III are among the many few figurative works inside the exhibition, each that includes cylindrical shapes chugging alongside practice tracks. But they’re nonetheless fairly summary: the factors of perspective are askew, the landscapes that the trains traverse are not more than monochromatic hazes. Yoo mentioned that he leaned into the intrinsic rigidity between the representational and the implied, working a second rail below the tracks of Prepare II or portray the freight in Prepare III to resemble a sushi roll. For Yoo, his observe will not be a writ of execution however an energetic enchantment, endlessly deferred towards the tracks of judgment and interpretation.
“The road between illustration and (figuration) will get blurry for me typically,” Yoo defined. “I normally begin a portray from a psychological picture, somewhat than a illustration… [Sometimes] the illustration isn’t shareable to the viewer, not as a result of I don’t wish to share it, however as a result of it begins from my head.”
Seaside is one other one in every of Yoo’s translucent and transferred work, however within the type of a self-portrait. On the middle of the portray, a Vitruvian Man by means of stick figuration stretches out yellow limbs over a salmon sq.. The determine’s head, in keeping with Yoo, hangs in a fragile steadiness; it’s a marshmallow, midway between roasted and charred. Courting a way of misery, he animalistically scratches and scrapes into the canvas, etching out opacity by any means mandatory.
In the end, Yoo paints from an interstitial place of discomfort and euphoria, the place the physique turns into one other web site of passage. The which means of Yoo’s work, like motion, is rarely mounted however briefly and serendipitously encountered.
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