Semiology of Analogy
In his Gestures exhibition, Yoon Ki-un presents diverse symbols from many hand gestures. Over 10 pieces displayed are made up of tiny hand shapes. Yoon uses his own hands as a model to depict his subject matter to look fresh and not standardized. Viewing his left hand, he draws it with his right. He sometimes uses mirrors too, but does not exploit photographs or video. Human beings have been able to use their hands freely since they have walked upright. Since then our hands have assumed diverse roles. Yoon’s work represents various functions of hands, such as pointing, conveying intention, and counting numbers. He began drawing hands for picture practice. Captivated by the feelings he derived from hands, he paid close attention to their form. In his work, hands appear in the overlap of other forms, or emerge independently. Tiny hands that flock together shape other forms, or specific hand gestures not completely the same appear in repetition. Viewers have to come to his work closely to grasp the hand shapes that appear similar yet different.
Yoon’s work 012345 ---- , made of eight lines and six rows of hands, applied with different hues, shows extremely diverse hand gestures. With the possibilities within various hand forms, we have developed diverse ways of communication such as finger languages and hand signs. In his work, hand gestures appear extremely diverse and different. These forms suggest the possibility of communication. In Echoes, the same shape of clenched hands spread horizontally, and its dimness and thickness intersect. This form’s lineal arrangement brings about a resonance like an echo. This disturbs any lineal flow conveying an obvious message, and transforms arranged images into aesthetic objects. The possibility of communication the hands have stands out in a work arranging faces side by side. Here, hands recall facial expressions and human behavior.
The work Let’s Wash Hands juxtaposes the six recommended stages of washing hands in a promotional publication by the civic group Pan-national Hand Washing Movement Headquarter and a man and woman in contact. This work showing contact between two people underscores the idea of preventive medicine. Seeing the scene of washing hands in the left scene, after viewing impure contact in the right, we gain a weird feeling from the gestures of rubbed hands. This work overthrows our notions of purity and impurity.
In I Am You, the word ‘꽃’ is depicted with joined hands, while the word ‘신’ is filled with tiny flowers like chrysanthemums. The work, also filling scissors with fists, and paper with scissors, like the rock-paper-scissors game, and external hands to the left, and internal hands to the right, dramatically represents heterogeneous others that form one body. The laws of social promises and specific functions of direction are disregarded here by such heterogeneous force. In another work, To Where, showcasing diverse hand gesture with lines, the background with hands in different directions fills the scene. Here, Yoon expresses confusion in illustrative clarity, a loss of direction, and ambiguity. Yoon commented in his statement in 2008 that “I intend to show through paintings the micro and macro worlds, beauty and ugliness, the right and wrong are actually not different.”
In Hand Motions, Yoon matches 12 hand gestures with facial expressions. Looking like emoticons, the heads whose hair and neck are abbreviated show various, interesting facial expressions despite their unified style. A semiotic aspect stands out in this work. For instance, widely open hands remind viewers of a comfortable face, clenched hands of a resolute look, reclined hands of the face of a lying man, and hands with thumps up of a prim look. Yoon reads faces through hands. In his work, hands fill the contour of an object he intends to depict and its space.
His Barracuda series is characterized by the overlap of the face of one of the 12 Earthy Branches animals and tiny hands. It is known that Barracuda is the fish that is found in tropical oceans and frequently congregate. This is a proper word to account for Yoon’s work formative units create a new form through their combination or congregation. This series forming crowds is conceived to look different, depending on the distance viewers see this. In Barracuda-Dog a dog’s head is created in silhouette with the tiny hand shapes floating on the dark background. In this work a process formative elements congregate and shape a form is represented in a dynamic structure.
In another Barracuda-Dog the hand shapes toward the outside look like a ball of thread. The color and arrangements of these hands appear diverse according to the features of animals he intends to depict. For example, Barracuda-Swine expresses a feeling of flesh, and Barracuda-Cattle represents the flow of hands in the color of a bull while in Barracuda-Rabbit a rabbit’s ear includes those hearing sounds.
Such crowd forms, culminated with this series, were the primary tendency of Yoon’s work in the late 2000s. The ecology of a crowd found in mass society was represented in his pieces featuring thread beads to depict diverse faces at The Picture Puzzle and The Circle exhibitions in 2007. Yoon’s ways of expanding or overlapping images through the associative relationships of form and meaning are analogical. This analogical method does not appear in this exhibition, but typical in some of his works overlapping a tiger, map, and landscape. One of these works looks like a tiger, if seen from a distance, but its closer look seems like a landscape.
Michel Foucault(1926-1984), in his book The Order of Things(Les Mots et les choses), points out ‘resemblance’ made a role of forming knowledge in Western culture up to the late 16thcentury. Things are linked like a chin in this paradigm. According to Foucault, a perception of natural things is to uncover the relations of such resemblance that made them maintain a close or independent connection with each other.
In Yoon’s works displayed in his 2007 exhibition, humans in a crowd form a great chain through analogy. This great chain of existence is typical in that this shows an analogy between the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of human beings. Such a connection through analogy is not unfamiliar in Oriental thought that shares symbolic ideas derived from nature. Yoon’s work makes use of the relationships of resemblance and difference found in two distinguishable elements to the full. This process of analogy is endless in his work.
Umberto Eco(1932~ ) argues in his publication On the Boundaries of Interpretation that the type of inference floats through an infinite entanglement of associations and continuous change of meanings. In Yoon’s work form appears unstable and floats endlessly, suggesting another analogy ceaselessly. The hands shaping a form in his work are ready to transform into another form, rotating its exterior orbit. His work’s ultimate purpose seems to be this floating itself, not settling. If this chain continues infinitely, any sign’s communicable aspect remains weakened while invigorating its multi-layered symbolic system instead as this allows open interpretations. In this respect, works of art involving symbolism have to do with the ways of thinking in religion and myth.
In the Barracuda series body parts filling the animals of the 12 Earthy Branches well represent a connotative relation involving one another. As Ernst Cassirer(1874-1945) revealed in The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, the self encircles or is encircled by the cosmos or the world. As man in the Renaissance period was in the relationships wrapping or being wrapped by God or an infinite universe, hands with human’s facial expression decide form in Yoon’s 12 animals. In his work an object represented through analogy is a medium expressing human feelings. This shows a process of fusing man and other beings. The hands in diverse gestures and with various expressions are somewhat flexible strings binding nature.
This is different from religious or mythical thoughts that have an ultimate objective to reach the great chain of existence. In other words, Yoon’s work is far away from the law of a rigid cause-and-effect relationship. In Yoon’s work for example, diverse expressions of hands appear as a way of communication, these are not a strict language system like hand language. However, his work has a semiotic feature due to the hand’s fundamental trait directing something. His hands creating a scene while flowing lineally and being accumulated share a diachronic and synchronic linguistic feature. In his work hands represent a monkey or a dragon, and a tiger turns to a map or a landscape. In Yoon’s pieces language, object, and man indicate each other, suggesting man are ina symbolic universe. His work quotes and newly interprets this symbolic system.
Human beings have lived in this symbolic universe. As this share symbolic system collapsed gradually, art, another symbolic system, remained detached from the systems of universal notions such as myth, religion, and language. This detachment sometimes appeared as a camouflaged form in the name of autonomy, but it was perilous to cut the roots of art. Foucault commented a close, deep connection between language and thinking collapsed as analogical thinking was dissolved in modern times. Things and words are divided, and the eyes are restricted to the function of seeing and the ears to the function of hearing. This division, however, is in no way desirable but is valuable for another fusion. Throughout modern times all were fragmentized through specialization, fusion was pursued by both artists and scientists seeking cutting-edge technology. Yoon’s work belongs to a contemporary cultural ecological system in which experiments are conducted to weave a net of new meaning in a formalized, autonomous language.
By Lee Sun-young, Art Critic
