Min Jung-Yeon — Hier je comprenais mieux aujourd’hui — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 31 → March 14, 2015

For a long time now, travels, exile and identity questionings have been the subject matters of Min Jung-Yeon’s work. Thus, before creating the ensemble exhibited for Yesterday I understood today better (Hier je comprenais mieux aujourd’hui), the artist created a series entitled The Road (La route). In these works, she speaks about her move from Paris to the South; the fevered state of leaving, the blend of exaltation and anxiety. The Road (La route) led her to a new life, in which the infinite sea has now become her everyday setting. This drawing and painting series immerses the spectator in the intimacy of the artist’s home. She exhibits to the world a series of portraits of her mother, memories of her father, feelings regarding her love life, her fears and thoughts about being a young mother, her boredom or her daily joys….

Yesterday I understood today better

From now on, Min Jung- Yeon has to compose with an everyday life made of repetitive tasks and find a meaning to a quite banal life. She is living the reproduction of a pattern she knows: When she was a child, her mother would redo the same gestures again and again while offering her the image of a comfortable and unwavering security… The artist is now in her mother’s role and her understanding of what she lived at that time modifies itself. What seemed to be so clear yesterday appears as an illusion today. Life reveals itself to be complex and sometimes absurd; maternity and wedded life a series of contradictory feelings, happiness and doubts. The beliefs of childhood are no longer. Yet she must struggle and find the strength to also make believe: To offer the promise of dawn¹. Times are superimposing themselves. Today becomes yesterday — yesterday today. Min Jung-Yeon is at the same time herself and the mirror of her mother. Yet the reflection in the mirror is altered. The everyday covers the truth, says the artist.

¹ a reference to Romain Gary’s novel: Promise at dawn (La promesse de l’aube), Gallimard, 1960

Every day landscapes

It’s this simple life, without extravagance that the artist is expressing in this new ensemble of drawings and paintings. Yet, the artist’s works do not resemble classic interior scenes in the least. While working with these topics Min Jung-Yeon is not explicit but metaphoric: Mountains erect themselves, grottos are dug; there are eruptions, scattered rocks and storms rising above the sea. In this manner, Min Jung-Yeon is the heiress of Asian landscape paintings and drawings, where nature represents the state of mind of people who live in it. She is also influenced by miniature landscapes that her father created from a stone collection — a way of bringing nature inside the home. Thus, the weariness in front of everyday domestic tasks becomes The Cliff of Laziness (Falaise de la Paresse ) — a mountain of languor to climb or a soft coat of procrastination in which to curl up into. Frustrations, resentments hide away under The shelter of a misunderstanding (l’Abris d’un malentendu), form menacing clouds in Before the rain (Avant la pluie) and become explicit in The Hour where ice melts (l’Heure où la glace fond). The feminine is flexible and in transformation — a salt statue the sea absorbs little by little; the masculine, structured and solid, like a wall that only shakes under big blows. The dialogue is not simple; these two strengths confront each other, sometimes merge or live in simple juxtaposition. To the drawings’ minute and almost obsessional graphic line are added the softness, the sensuality and the unpredictability of watercolor. The use of this new technique has become so clear to her since she is living overlooking the sea. It expresses the days going by, that merge into each other as wave movements — but also a soft melancholy, a soothing. The artist’s work has evolved towards a new suppleness where abstraction has gained in importance and the pictorial space has opened itself.

Background

Born in 1979 in South Korea, Min Jung-Yeon graduated in Fine Arts (Hongick University, Seoul, 2003 and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris (ENSBA), 2005). Showing regularly in Asian, European and Middle Eastern galleries since 2004, she also participated in Medi(t)ation, the third Asian Contemporary Art Biannual presented in the Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts in 2011.

The Galerie Maria Lund has been working with the artist since 2010. The gallery hosted her first solo show in France Memories from a greenhouse (Mémoire de la serre) in 2012 and has shown her work in fairs and collective exhibitions (Contemporary drawing Salon — Drawing Now, Paris, 2010, 2011 and 2012). Min Jung-Yeon was the winner for the third edition of the Partners’ Prize (Prix des Partenaires) held by the Museum of Modern Art, St. Etienne Métropole. She was rewarded with a solo show of her drawings during the summer of 2012, along with a catalog. Min Jung-Yeon’s work has been the subject of a dozen catalogs and numerous publications in the media in both Europe and Korea. Hibernation, a monographic publication appeared in 2009. Her series of paintings and drawings The Road (La route) was presented at the YIA Salon in October 2014 where it received an enthusiastic reception.