Young Churl Shim: The Art of Awareness - Donald Brackett > 평론

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Young Churl Shim: The Art of Awareness

The poet Rilke has compared human life to a room, but too often a room which the inhabitants never fully explore or ever really become comfortable living in. “It is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot, one narrow stripe on which they keep walking back and forth.” Certainly this affords us a shaky security of sorts but also presents a starling limitation. Art is not however, about security, in fact it may perhaps be nourished only by approaching the in secure outside the “room” of our experience. A strong artwork is often best defines as a room within a room: a significant territory illuminated by the artist’s insight, shared by those of us who choose th recognize the pecular shadows cast on the walls around us. 

Young Churl Shim is a relatively youthful artist from Korea for whom the media and raw material of an artwork is not necessarily paint or canvas, metal or stone, but rather the raw awareness inherent in our humanity. One of her primary “materials” therefore is somewhat immaterial, the perception of the viewer. Perhaps visitor would be a more accurate term, for the viewer does not so much observe her work in the traditional manner as become surrounded, enveloped by by it. In fact the visitor invariably must become an integral part of the artwork. Naturally enough, we are not used to becoming the media ourselves, but her art requires our presence to be transmitted effectively, or to become fully animated.

Young Churl is an artist fascinated by borderlines: the line between the painting and the sculpture, between humanity and technology, between the personal and universal, between faith and doubt. As an installation artist she of course manipulates sculpture within an architectural context, but pushes the defined realm of installation further and deeper by including high charged emotional ideas, often even spiritual belief system. Generally installation is a somewhat cerebral enterprise, often dry and too reliant on the techno-aspects of the electronic stage. Her works however, are highly humanist and interactive, while still being challenging, perplexing, provocative. But the most intense borderline immanence and transcendence. Her works maintain a strong attachment to the immanent, to that which we know through experience, though being in the world; her works also explore the transcendent, the reservoir which suggests certain truths outside or beyond our experience, often relegated to the expressing of religion or philosophy. No less real, they are the essential aspects of her work which cause connections between herself and viewer-visitor. Steel, paper, straw, glass, books, video, light and darkness, all find a place in her art, dramatically physical properties are transformed into metaphysical flights.

Belief and beyond belief: the edgeless experience. Here is the art of awareness, not awareness of, just awareness.

There is much theatre in her art, not theatre in terms of entertainment but rather of confrontation. She constructs an invisible stage, the room-space of the gallery, upon which her personal soliloquy is dramatically enacted. An existential play of objects and we are the visitors who engage them. Her script is made of physical reality, her aesthetic concerned with clarity. She wants to shed as much light as possible on this mysterious room called life.

Donald Brackett – Art Critic, Media Montag

Toronto, Canada