Fall Exhibition 2009: “The Two Silences of Heaven and Earth”
Sung Won Yun
An artist-in-residence at Andover Newton Theological School, Sung Won Yun is completing her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. She previously earned an MFA in painting from Sungshin Women’s University (Seoul, Korea), and received the certificate of Natural Science Illustrator in 2007 from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI).
Sung Won has previously had two solo exhibitions at the KEPCO Plaza Gallery in Seoul (2002, 2005), and one at the Asia and Pacific Trade Center in Osaka, Japan (2005). She has participated in more than fifty group exhibitions in many countries, including Korea, Japan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and the United States.
In the summer of 2008, Sung Won was selected as an artist-in-residence at the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE).
Artist's Statement
The photographs and paintings in this exhibit explore what I consider the “silences” of heaven and of earth, silences made not of emptiness but of the hallowed forms which witness to all that has gone before and all that will yet be. When we observe something undisturbed, gazing at some dimension of the natural world for a long enough period of time, we find ourselves able to see beyond the surfaces and shapes. Our gaze penetrates something more substantial. This contemplative experience awakens within us a sense that there is something moving slowly, almost imperceptibly slowly, at the core and spirit of the landscape. At this point, distinctions fall away and silence seems to mirror a unity of perception and experience.
The inspiration for this work started from my own experience growing plants which vividly demonstrate the vital life processes. I grew beans from seed, observing their transformation from emergence to death. I recorded my observations in a journal, noting biological details, the movement and formation of roots, the changes of stems and leaves over time, and their continuous evolution. My initial drawings and paintings captured these processes in detailed images. I focused particularly on roots and their movement, which signify for me the essential life-force present in all living things. By experimenting with plants, I began to see how organic forms can be observed as a process, one that chronicles a story of formation and evolution. Distilling shapes from these observations, I reconstructed them to find images that point to the circulation of life and time.
Some of my work seeks to construct evolutionary images of organisms. I cut paintings or photos containing organic shapes and arrange them to produce a larger organic form deriving from the micro-structures of animals or plants. The new images mimic the characteristics of life as I dissect the various parts while still maintaining the appearance of a “whole” organism. By performing dissection repeatedly, one can begin to disclose images of single cells.
These recent works create micro-organisms that seem to float in their own universe, a spatial construction with infinite temporal layers found in all organisms, spanning from a primordial period to the present moment. Such a trajectory suggests an apparently infinite arc of time. As the layers accumulate, meaning emerges and finds a new integration which points to an overarching synthesis. I feel the same event happening repeatedly in time, creating new meanings: the micro-organism, portrayed as floating in an infinite universe, interacts with a dynamic trajectory linking past, present, and future.
The photographs of Iceland included in this exhibit point to this flow of time in nature. The enduring snowfields of Iceland record a history of change accumulated over time; they point to a transformation that spans past and future in the only apparent stillness of the present moment. Such images suggest the temporal dynamism of geological processes, evoking a phenomenology of space and a geometry of form in the emotional texture that the photographic image is able to capture. The mirroring surfaces of Iceland’s winter land- and seascapes, often shrouded by clouds, evoke a sense of serenity and timelessness which I also seek to disclose in my paintings. At the heart of this perception, the two silences of heaven and earth reveal themselves as parts of an indistinguishable whole, witnesses to a unity of being that is both within us and beyond us in the world we inhabit.
