each of the texts in Yoon’s artworks are split and cut as they are, even though these disconnected texts seem to construct a clear image and present a direction. Therefore, more and more we closely observe the beautiful figure of the object, it nakedly reveals its poor constitution, which seems to be collapsed like a loose structure, a mirage of meaning. The work of Bori Yoon symbolically shows the truth of human method of seeing through the image, which is created by accumulating the fragmented and dissembled texts. The image, which indicates an explicit object, can be also another aspect of the text, which has to be temporal. Yoon’s artwork is letting us to clearly realize this limitation, through the figure of the image, which is trapped in the matrix of text.

Bori Yoon : About The Illusion of Meaning and The Limitation of Text

Yi Seung Hun (Cyart Laboratory, Cyart Space in Seoul)

From a certain point of view, the result of Bori Yoon’s work seems glamorous and even decorative, like the layers of piled up building blocks with mortar. From the dragonfly, airplane and garden with luxuriant vegetation to pop-star, Yoon’s images are presented in a transparent shape, like an icon. The words and sentences, which the artist selected, are thinly cut with the surgical knife and chopper, and the texts in each paper strips are disorderly mixed to loose their original context and meaning, as well as become the material for the depiction. In the end, these texts are gathered to be an image that indicates a certain object, but their initial use and meaning are dissembled so that the reconstructed result is presented in the form of art painting. So the text functions only as the substructure of changed context and the material for artwork.

The fact, which the artist has chosen the text as the material to make the figure, is related to Yoon’s past experience. Once, the artist had to work all night to restore a shredded document by reattaching the slices, to resolve a suspicion and misunderstanding toward her family. The artist says she and her family were deeply affected by this incident, which still lays over her artwork as a trauma. At the moment, some the fragments of the text must be too tiny to have an episememe, and she must be gone through a certain kind of act of solving pictorial puzzle to acquire the referential meaning. We can assume her artwork, which is in a form of processing text, is evolved from this experience.

The artist’s current art making is though, a bit different from the act of recombining the document and restoring the original form in the past. At that time, the purpose was to attain the initial document, but now her art work is rather making one word as an anchor to incapacitate the preexisting context and transfer to another one, than recomposing the former contextual meaning of the text.

Here, we need to check one thing. The work of Bori Yoon should not be understood as a sublimated rebirth of shredded paper scraps, which is a beautiful result of depiction. Yoon’s artwork is not to recreate a snobbish and aesthetic beauty by recycling and refining the waste, like the artists, who gathered the junks and miscellaneous items and worked as the genre, Junk Art. The point of Yoon’s artwork is not on the texts, which may look beautifully sublimated and earned a referential meaning, but on the matter of referential alteration from text to image, which happens in the process of taking the printed text out from the former context (the referential meaning) and converting the context into the heterogenic field of painting. The text in the printed document is disconnected from the prior meaning and used as the instrument of image. Now the text, which is disjointed and transferred into another dimension of image, reach to the point to expose its referential limitation in multiple layers, so that it has to infinitely open its border of meaning.

From this point of view, each of the texts in Yoon’s artworks are split and cut as they are, even though these disconnected texts seem to construct a clear image and present a direction. Therefore, more and more we closely observe the beautiful figure of the object, it nakedly reveals its poor constitution, which seems to be collapsed like a loose structure, a mirage of meaning.

The work of Bori Yoon symbolically shows the truth of human method of seeing through the image, which is created by accumulating the fragmented and dissembled texts. The image, which indicates an explicit object, can be also another aspect of the text, which has to be temporal. Yoon’s artwork is letting us to clearly realize this limitation, through the figure of the image, which is trapped in the matrix of text.