ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yonghee Chin (b. 1974) is a New York-based artist who explores the interstices of light and shadow through sculpture, painting, photography, print making, performance, and installation works, visualizing the diverse emotions that all humans can experience. She repurposes discarded paper and canvases, giving them new value and suggesting ways to endure paper's delicate yet persistent life. The reuse of materials gains new roles and meanings through her touch, akin to human relationships and life. It presents aesthetic value by using the texture, color, shape, and the delicate yet persistent elements of paper. Post-pandemic, she found some of her previous canvas works from her studio and reworked them, starting some pieces on top of existing underdrawings. The beauty and joy are part of the previous and recent work put together with the layers. The ongoing remnants of work, the uninterrupted work, and the records of life are her memories, her people, what she wants to leave behind. More than a magnificent artistic philosophy, her work is about cherishing the limited amount of heart one can pour into things and observing the few things one longs for and thinks about daily. People sometimes face uncontrollable and unexpected situations; Chin explores the unseen movement of light, matter, and human existence within these contexts. The unavoidable connections to life and death, leaving and longing, hurt, and healing are the structures of fate that link to her, a process of questioning and answering.
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The discovery of the various 'faces' of a painting over time, each revealed by the light of day, night, and dawn. She remarks on the surprise of shifting shadows and the layered darkness that compose mysterious spaces within the work. The recent pieces primarily emerge from ongoing experiments with shadow and illusion, focusing on the interplay of space, line, form, color, and the natural effects of materials that shape light and shadow. Chin seeks to explore these mysterious spaces and express more than what meets the eye, asking whether observers can distinguish between shadows released by nature and those generated through the material. She invites us to imagine a night sea, invisible yet perceived through sound, its calm darkness suggesting the ocean's presence—a metaphor for the moment we sense the truth and fall under the magic of illusion, a time without light but not without an awareness of it.