YeesookyungTranslated Vase_2019 TVCW 3
In 2001, Yeesookyung watched a revered master of Korean ceramics destroy a vase that he considered imperfect. Gathering up the shards, the younger artist made a new vessel, held together with joins of gold. The resulting “translated vase” was a unique work, part of an ongoing series initiated in 2002.
Yeesookyung’s joining technique is reminiscent of Japanese kintsugi repairs, where broken ceramics are sealed back together with fine lines of gold. Rather than re-creating the original vessel, however, Yeesookyung distorts it, setting pieces together in forms that can be bulbous and ungainly. The broken vessel is not repaired but reinvented, the fragments assembled into something unexpected and new.
There is, in this work, a deep consideration of value and of the ethics of preservation. Yeesookyung questions canons of beauty – why one thing is discarded while another is preserved, for example – as well as what is meant by “restoration.” Is it a particular form that is being restored? A function? Or might it be something more abstract, like beauty or strength? Her “translations” prioritize mutability over permanence, treating fragility as a virtue. Or as she put it in a 2020 interview: “My work can be seen as a glorification of the fateful weakness of being.” (ER)
About the artist
Yeesookyung was born in 1963 in Seoul, Korea, where she continues to live and work. She received a BFA in painting from Seoul National University in 1987 and an MFA from the university in 1989. An artist in multiple media, yeesookyung is perhaps best known for her Translated Vase series, in which broken, cracked, or discarded ceramics are turned into and reimagined as dynamic sculptural forms. Her art reflects her personal heritage and traditional East Asian art, yet is unmistakably contemporary. Recent solo exhibitions include I am not the only one but many at Massimo De Carlo in London (2020); Whisper Only to You at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples (2019–20); and When I Become You, Yeesookyung in Taipei at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (2015). Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She participated in the 2017 Venice Biennale.
