The Stuffed Wildness - Shelter in the City

Lee, Eun-ju (Art History)

A cactus made of cement in artist Im, Sun-yi's studio attracts the visitor's attention. It's form stands still like a scene from monochrome picture. It looks like a specimen in botanical garden. Motif such as ornamental plant, floral wallpaper, folding screen embroidered with butterflies in Im's works is the image to be found in standardized urban daily life. We don't need to have a critical mind on the materials in the works, because they are very close to our life. But, impression from a stuffed, ash-colored cactus is not casual at all. Rather, it is have a strong impact to reverse the unmoved life.

In the previous series work called finding the hidden picture, Im inserted images she made into a scene from urban-scape such as electricity line or gas pipe on cement wall, cover for a women magazine, and transformed it remarkably. This looks like an ordinary, common thing at first sight, but there is a subtle cutoff breaking the daily life and it takes a part as comma on ordinary visual circumstance in the work. In this exhibition bringing up the subject shelter, Im's works lead viewers to use their daily circumstance, to see and interpret the hidden meaning of it.

Shelter means an usual, private space preserving us from outer space. Sehando(winter scene) used as a motif in her work symbolizes a private space isolated from the outer. The original intention of Sehando is solitude as inner reflect, and the meaning on aseity's self-image is converted to the metaphor as social, cultural isolation in the context of ornamental plant, cheap floral wallpaper, folding screen embroidered with butterflies. The isolation in this work connotes double meaning with self-safety device and disassociation from it. Especially, she remarks about identity of urbanite in private space through the intention as isolation from nature.

From Adam's leather clothes to modern apartment town, tools of human civilization have developed to protect human from natural threats. Our habitation surrounded by square concrete wall is a substantial shelter preventing the outer from intruding and an extreme artificial space castrated natural wildness. City dwellers in the shelter are protected, but, in fact, they build an artificial rampart to grow further apart with natural conditions of human nature by isolation from natural energy. In the middle zone between mental fear to violence of nature and homing instinct to natural life, urbanites fill their space with stuffed, coded, fake natural objects instead of natural circumstance filled with wildness. The artist's work reminds us a basic dilemma like this modern life symbolized as pet, ornamental plant, floral wallpaper, and insecticide.

Im never agrees or disagrees with our unstable balance on the obscure border between the natural and the artificial. She just reveals the subtle state of equilibrium. Image of artificialized nature, minimum openness to the outer space and covert gaze to the inner space are crossing each other in the form of Sehando pierced by pin or icon of asian paintings cut out like a digital cell. The boundary line between the inner and the outer space, nature and human placed on her work imply existent condition of modern people. It seems that she expresses our ironic image expanding personal space according to natural law, as the law of survival of the fittest is artificialized nature like a cement cactus, although all things become artificial circumstance. However, her tone involves some kind of an affectionate sympathy without cynic. There is no doubt that she knows, in fact, hygienics in modern civilization denying aging and decomposition and taking something new is the sign of weakness of ourselves.