The Best Things To Hold Onto: Hiejin Yoo @ Half Gallery, NYC
Half Gallery // January 13, 2022 - February 12, 2022
Hiejin Yoo
takes a multi-sensory approach to her image-making: catching a desert
breeze in her scarf at night, the silent soundtrack playing an air
guitar at sunset, or the dragging teeth of a comb releasing the perfume
of a lawn thick with grass. She believes in the deities of nature - the
boundlessness where imagination meets a sky rich with clouds - all
though the gentle lens of magic realism. This tact allows the artist to
combine sense memory and her own contemporary biography.
In Sweetness Overloaded, Hiejin harkens back to a
painting from her inaugural half gallery exhibition in 2018. The picture
in question showed a dark silhouette of Hiejin sitting alone on a
rooftop her very first night in America, wondering anxiously what her
life might become here. Ten years later we see her intertwined with her
husband - flower rings adorning her fingers - content with the “everyday
mundane happiness” of existence. Seasons, too, weigh heavily on her
landscapes, take Falling into Fall where we witness the veil of
summer pulled away like a curtain of parted hair. And everywhere she
casts her gaze there seems to be music, be it an electronic keyboard
spanning the shore of a distant lake or the sound hole of an acoustic
guitar paralleling a curve in the highway.
Hands! The majority of her paintings feature hands - some
disembodied, often ombre - framing the action, yes, but also suggesting
the fascination of articulation we find in Bruce Nauman’s studies of
twisted fingers and thumbs, a secret sign language. Her palette embraces
the exuberance of flowers and blooming trees alike while her subject
matter in, say,
The Only Child’s Bunkbed Fantasy speaks to an eternal longing which a crescent moon can never shine brightly enough to eclipse.
https://halfgallery.com/
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