Ateliers d’artistes de la ville de Marseille Joohee Yang

Joohee
Yang

Studio : Ateliers de la ville 1 place de Lorette Fr-13002 Marseille

BIOGRAPHIE

I think that fundamentally, creation works like a pendulum oscillating between intimate belief and critical refutation, at a frantic pace that leaves no time for blind belief or paralysing self-doubt.

The same goes with my lifestyle. It is like a weighing scale where multiple cultures (German, Canadian, South Korean, French, Japanese and Swiss) are struggling to reach equilibrium. Or like a tightrope from which I keep falling with never-ending curiosity and pleasure. More than anything, I want to keep pursuing this experimental direction.

I believe that the creative process, the art piece in its gestative stage, is just as important – and perhaps more – than its concrete output, which is immediately transformed from the moment it is presented to the outside eye.

By taking part in a series of residencies, thus subjecting myself to perpetual motion, I have become aware that these transitional time-spaces are particularly dense and fecund periods. The obligation to “give birth” in situ can have very stimulating effects, while time and space constraints induce a reflection on my work’s conditions of existence.

My research feeds from my relation with the socio-cultural background of the place where I’m working. I extract materials from this place’s urban traits, customs and superstitions, and more generally from its mode of existence. The recurring question that underpins my work could be summed up as follows: how do nature and culture coexist, fit together and balance each other out in different environments? And how can an artist contribute to answering this question?

Born in South Korea.
Lives and works as a travelling observer with no stable studio. Uses creation to raise questions in all areas of knowledge.

www.jooheeyang.com

Born in Seoul, Joo-Hee Yang grew up in an ambience of “concrete and neon lighting”. Unlike her, her homeland is blithely unconcerned by historical markers: every reminder of the past is torn down and replaced by glittering new buildings, with nothing but a plaque to mark its passing. Nature too seems to be meeting the same fate – while also peeping through in Yang’s work. As an artist she reacts to given contexts, defying the rule of the synthetic with intimations of the organic. Her installations are the product of long and arduous toil, most often involving materials she has not previously worked with. There is no trace of the standardised in her practice: fluctuation is all. Gazing at her shattered cinder blocks and earth-covered floors, we are at a loss to know if her aesthetic concern is with building sites or ruins. Far removed from Korea’s consumerist hysteria, Joo-Hee Yang journeys from one artist’s residency to the next, tackling new traditions as she goes and setting as much store by process as by the results she abandons to the context of their birth.

Charlotte Cosson & Emmanuelle Luciani