YI YOUJIN: Positive Sinking

《Positive Sinking》 is Yi Youjin’s second solo exhibition in Korea since 2021. The artist tells me that the title is intended as a wordplay, referring to the slip of the tongue that occurs when non-native speakers of English try to make sounds absent in their native tongue. Specifically, Germans often confuse ‘th’ with ‘s’. Now the title could be Positive Thinking, which is also the more familiar phrase in English. I am reminded of the connection that seems to exist between sinking and thinking in everyday expressions, such as “immersed in thought” or “deep in thought”, as though there is a well into which our minds descend when we are thinking. It is also worth noting that Yi’s solo exhibition at Munich’s Tanja Pol Galerie in 2018 was titled Unter Bewusstsein—a twist on the German word for subconsciousness, Unterbewusstsein. With a single space, the word became “under consciousness,” suggesting a spatial dimension to consciousness that can be accessed by a downward or sinking motion. Yi confirms her fascination with sinking in our conversation, comparing her process to taking a deep dive into the water. For her, the act of painting is akin to “being alone in bottomless water,” in which the resulting works on canvas and paper portray the world underneath her consciousness.

What does it look like under Yi’s consciousness? The artist’s work has been described as “surreal,” “dreamlike,” “fairytale-like,” and “Ghibli-esque,” depicting animal and human figures rendered in a distinctive style that straddles the abstract and figurative. Certain motifs recur, such as cats, owls, crows, monkeys, divers, pine trees, the moon, water, clouds, and windows, dwelling in ambiguous, undefined spaces that complicate the understanding of the exposed surface as empty in conventional Western painting. In an earlier work titled Taucher (Diver) (2017), for example, the central human figure consists of a rounded shape in white, with red and black strokes to define its fingers, and large black oval suggestive of the diving helmet. It is surrounded by trees, thinly outlined in graphite, whose cloud-like foliage echoes the shape of the helmet. The white of the trees and the figure contrasts with the creamy colour of the paper, making it clear that the majority of the background is unpainted, but Yi transforms that empty space into a body of water by adding subtle ripples to the bottom of the trees.

Yi’s unusual treatment of empty space or bare surface may be considered in light of her background. Born in Gangneung in 1980, the artist enrolled at Sejong University in Seoul in 2000 to study Korean painting. Although she would leave school prematurely due to the conservative academic atmosphere at the time, Yi reflects that the philosophy embedded in Eastern Asian traditional painting has stayed with her to this day. One such concept is “the beauty of empty space,” itself rooted in Daoism, which refers to the practice of leaving blank space in paintings as an appreciation of simplicity and serenity. As the artist goes on to elaborate, however, it was when she left the familiar environment of upbringing for Germany, where she has lived since, that she began to seriously consider the influence of her background in her work. Between 2004 and 2011, studying for a Masters with Günther Förg at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Yi began what she describes as the “delicate balancing act of navigating diverse influences and contrasting perspectives”.^[1] While working primarily with the Western mediums of oil and acrylic paint, Yi paints with the canvas or hanji on the floor as opposed to the easel. This vertical relationship to her work releases the artist from her immediate surroundings and allows her to focus solely on the space before her. The physical world remains above the surface as she dives into the water, where gravity dissolves and figures merge with one another as with the conjoined pair of owls delicately perched on a sphere in Nocturne (2024). Colours expand and fill in shapes instead of sculpting shadows in Migratory Being (2023), rendering the landscape flat, while multiple spaces coexist in corners of the sky, the inside of a figure’s hoodie, and puddles on the ground in The Inbetween (2024). Yi’s paintings evade the linear perspective of Western painting in favour of uncertain and shifting boundaries.

At the same time, the sense of depth has become more pronounced in Yi’s recent work. The straight confines of windows in Whispering to the Clouds or Purple Curtain (both 2024) strengthen a sense of structure, separating the spaces on either side of the windows even as the lower halves of these paintings remain ambiguous. Yi explains that some of her paintings are “heavier” in the literal sense, having accrued more paint on the surface, and as images in her aspiration to create more clearly defined spaces, which is perhaps inevitable as a result of sinking deeper and deeper below.

《Positive Sinking》 also reflects the artist’s growing interest in the sense of space with her ceramic sculptures from 2024. Since her first foray into sculpture with polymer clay six years ago, Yi has thoroughly investigated the material and shifted to work with ceramic clay, finding harmony between the classical material and her paintings. The resulting objects, the largest of which measures 30 centimetres in height, retain the mystery of their painted counterparts in their round, pointy, or clustered forms.

Having established Yi’s approach to painting, the individual works in 《Positive Sinking》 remain largely undiscussed. As jaded as it may sound, the best way to experience them is to find delight and confidence in our own interpretations. Let me share an appropriate anecdote. During one of our conversations, the artist reveals that in spite of the animals populating her work, she does not particularly like any of them. People often assume that she likes cats when, in fact, Yi is afraid of them. She is intrigued by animals’ proximity to humans and the usefulness of their forms as motifs, but she does not understand them. Nor does she desire to do so: she is comfortable with staying in a state of “not-knowing”. I hope this tale illustrates how challenging it can be to gauge an artist’s inner world through their work and search for a logical meaning that may not be present there. It is not a coincidence that terms such as “investigate” and “explore” have become commonplace when describing artistic practices—what artists release into the material world is as unfamiliar  to them as it is to the viewer. Herein lies the enriching potential of sinking: being alone with our thoughts in bottomless water, learning to be comfortable with ambivalence, the unknown, and unstable definitions.

Sherry Paik