Yoon Il Kwon

‘The Path of Eyes’ is a series of mixed media works addressing the value of the unnoticed visual information that surrounds us on daily journeys. From that which is routinely missed, to that which is literally overlooked, we are all so busy getting somewhere that we are often not present in the moment. The artist retraced a journey in South Korea, from Seoul to Donghae, to find his old primary School. Yoon took hundreds of photographs along the journey, wherever his gaze happened to pause or linger, accumulating them into a fastidious mosaic of smaller images laid over the central image of his ‘memorable place’. The work echoes the journey itself; by elevating the ‘unimportant’ collateral scenes into the same field as the consciously viewed subject, Yoon asserts their value, endowing what we miss with as much significance as that which we gaze upon in order to remember.

‘Memory’ is the title of the large sculptural work in the middle of the stand and it focuses on the characteristics of objects comprised of layers. Napkins, stacked in countless ply, are quickly used and forgotten everyday objects. The screen-printed images derive from photographs of the artist’s primary school classmates. Yoon reproduces the faces of those remembered, partly remembered and completely forgotten, to communicate the process of fading memory. Although we may have forgotten most of our classmates, the clarity of our memory depends on our attachment to the individual, and the artist is interested in the disparities between these vestiges of memory.

‘The Movement in the Space’ is a series of delicate etchings describing the movement of playground equipment. Although derived from the artist’s own childhood memories, by silently re-animating the objects and figures in this way, he summons and imprints the past onto the present, inviting us to recall our own playground memories.