Yi Joungmin Korea, 1971-2019

Yi Joungmin discovers and collects elements that trigger her emotions in the scenery passing by while walking through the city. The objects are various forms of our lives that the artist herself encounters in her daily life, ranging from lonely vacant lots in the city center, reinforcing bars in construction sites, unnaturally trimmed landscaping trees, or abandoned forests on the outskirts of the city.

Yi Joungmin, who majored in oriental painting at Ewha Womans University, says that the method of oriental painting is not to express emotions directly but to be refined through continuous training. However, even if it is trained with continuous training, the development of a work that takes place on a canvas, often leads to unexpected results, depending on the working conditions and circumstances. Yi Joungmin says that the process of harmonizing the original power of the object or circumstance, the artist's drawing behavior, and the physical phenomenon that disrupts the writing line due to the effect of a substance created with incomplete mixing ink and acrylic is sometimes very fascinating.

Through this, we can understand the 'form' expressed as a restrained pencil line as an idea that influences social solidarity, not just an aesthetic imagination of an artistic dimension, and it represents a social passion commonly observed in other works of Yi Joungmin. The ability to discover and empathize with the elements that stimulate one's emotions in life stems from affection and social solidarity toward others. What Yi Joungmin suggests through her work is to examine where the various causes of empathy we feel for humans or objects come from and let her think for herself about the principle of finding the direction of life on her walk through the senses obtained.