Yooyun Yang: With Hands

Blindspot Gallery is pleased to present “Yooyun Yang: With Hands”, the South Korean artist’s debut solo exhibition in Hong Kong. With a background in Korean ink wash painting, Yang paints and builds up layers of diluted acrylic on Korean traditional paper, Hanji, which is made from the mulberry tree bark. Yang’s realist paintings of cropped close-ups of people, places and objects are like disjointed excerpts unveiling fragments of a narrative. Incorporating light and shadow to conjure enigma, Yang’s paintings which stem from journalistic images and personal snapshots evoke jamais vu, turning the mundane into visceral and uncanny tableaus.

“With Hands” presents a new body of work that spotlights labor and its palpable traces in hands and objects. The paintings isolate the hands, heightening a sense of solitude in the menial and repetitive task performed by their owner. Hands are synonymous with manual labor, something that is undervalued and overshadowed in an era governed by digital technology. These paintings are a shift from her earlier works which portray hands with physical wounds, a result of resistance and nonconformity. “With Hands” also features Yang’s paintings of worn and discarded objects which display the vestiges of labor, like things that are outlived and have become redundant.

Yang’s close-up on the hands accentuates their gestures, movements, and marks which display the traces of labor. Through the use of Hanji, which has a fibrous and skin-like texture, the hands become tactile and evoke a sense of tenderness and intimacy. This texture also captures the state of isolation and concentration that comes with performing repetitive and monotonous tasks.

With Hands is an elongated blow-up of a pair of hands carefully working with a spool of metallic thread, preparing to assemble an appliance. The right-hand sits atop a black electric component which doubles as a hand rest to ease the meticulous and repetitive task. Contrastingly, A Short Break captures a moment of respite as a worker takes a break from painting, holding a cigarette between his paint-splattered fingers.

From Early Evening frames in on a hand holding up a lamp to illuminate a dark space, perhaps a symbol of the tireless work that continues even into the night. In Night Workers, the legs and hands of the laborers are captured under a glaring light during the nocturnal hours. The shadow cast from beneath the feet of the worker runs beyond the picture frame, positioning us viewers as if we are peering into the scene from a close distance.

Objects become imbued with the remnants of labor, disposed and abandoned because they have outlasted their functionalities and usefulness. Yang analogizes these neglected artefacts with laborers whose value have become undermined. Trace 1 depicts tattered banners drifting in the wind, forgotten in the corner. They hang merely on two metallic wires hooked onto the drying rack. A sense of melancholy is evoked in the object, the image of the cloth lingering in one’s mind. Net is a chiaroscuro spotlighting a hole in a net, hinting at a space for potential escape or breakthrough.