[Culture Leader] Young-Churl Shim, Professor, School of Art and Design at Suwon University > Media

• 목록

Creating Curiosity of Science and Art into Artworks, Attracting Audiences with a Variety of Performances

Passion for art and simplicity of life.

In a way, these words do not seem to go well with each other, but I recently met Professor Young-churl Shim of the School of Art and Design at Suwon University's College of Fine Arts, who showed a deep passion for art and the girlish simplicity she possessed.

Professor Young-churl Shim is an artist who maximizes communication through multi-channels. In the meantime, she used natural elements such as water, fire, earth, wood, stone, sand, salt, and grass, as well as minerals such as iron, stainless steel, glass, and FRP, commercial videos, holograms, optical fibers, neon, and so on. Along with that, objects such as jars, candles, and coins were also used.

As such, for the first time in Korea, she is creating a multi-sensory (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory) total environment through artistic sculpture, three-dimensional installation, relief, painting, and performance. Moreover, there is a unique charm in assimilating the diversity of art by approaching the audience first with various performances for each exhibition.

Professor Young-churl Shim was born as the youngest of four daughters. Her father, a successful businessman, had a special interest in the arts, and her mother devoted her entire life to educating her children.

Thanks to his father's active will for art education, since childhood, Professor Young-churl Shim and her four siblings were able to grow up in an artistic educational environment including music, art, and dance. Her mother's tendency to focus on reading and devotion to his children was everything in her life.

 “Since the age of four, I have been curious about dancing, to the point where I naturally danced to music, so I started learning Korean dance and ballet. When I was in middle school, my father wanted me to become a dancer, winning the top prize at the National Dance Competition.”

Professor Young-Churl Shim's performance underlies this background of growth. Dynamic movements and musical elements became important elements in her work, because of the underlying foundation of curiosity and education encompassing all artistic fields.

Young-Churl Shim, who entered Sungshin Women's University in 1975, had a longing for sculpture when she saw the work of Professor Kwan-Mo Jeong, who had just returned from studying in the United States.

“The first assignments in Professor Kwan-Mo Jeong’s studio were ‘crush the soil that is as hard as a lump of stone’, ‘wipe the kettle clean with gypsum, and boil some water’, and ‘peel the bark off the tree’. These were tasks to start sculpting not from admiration, but from a sincere aspiration, a genuine understanding of the basic materials and processes.”

Afterwards, she opened her first solo exhibition titled ‘Stepwise Representation of Comb’ in 1983.

“By attempting to explore femininity and objects with the comb, which is a woman's hairdressing tool, as a material, I began to pursue the spiritual element hidden behind the material in my work. This means that my life is my own work, and my life and emotions are molten into the themes of my solo exhibition.”

Professor Young-Churl Shim got married right after graduating from graduate school, and immediately after that, in 1984, she and her husband left to study in the United States. Then, while taking coursework at ‘Otis-Parsons’ in Los Angeles, while pursuing a doctoral program at ‘Golden State University’, she diversified her sculptural environment while intensively digging into it.

While studying abroad, she said, “I opened my eyes to new media and genres such as holograms, videos, installations, light art, and kinetic art. In particular, the new environment and advances in science have continuously stimulated my curiosity about the medium, since I was educated in sculpture to be faithful to the traditional concept of ‘clump’, that curiosity began to draw the products of science into the realm of art by constantly experimenting with new media.”

As such, the dazzling neon signs that Professor Young-Churl Shim experienced in Las Vegas, USA became the inspiration for her light art, and she even envisioned the achievement of civilization like a computer as her work. The discovery that Nam June Paik was working with a monitor, in an article about him, which she encountered by chance at a bookstore, had a great influence on her career as an installation sculptor.

The solo exhibition ‘Jesus Love You’ (Gallery Dongsong Art Center), held in 1989 when Professor Young-Churl Shim returned from the United States, and subsequent exhibitions show her experimental world of work through exploration of various media.

At the time, there were those who did not recognize her work as traditional sculpture or art, but she was able to build her own artistic field because she had stronger conviction than anyone else in her instinctive curiosity, and her open awareness of art.

Now, Professor Young-Churl Shim does not hesitate to become a student herself, by always looking for new interests.

“Now, taking classes in art and management, I am learning an open perspective on ‘creativity’. The management mindset of entrepreneurs and the artistic spirit of artists are not completely separate. If technology had been the driving force of the world, I think that 'art' will take its place. Under the belief that the creativity necessary for entrepreneurs to lead the world is no different from that of an artist, wouldn't it be appropriate to more actively link art and the environment, art and technology, and art and commerce?” As such, Professor Young-Churl Shim continues to challenge herself for creative ideas.

[source] Gyeonggi Newspaper (https://www.kgnews.co.kr)