Threshold of Respect by Yong Joo Kim

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Yong Joo Kim

For the first 5 years of her career, she was able to continuously create new pieces of art while limiting herself to the use of a single material: hook-and-loop fasteners. Then one day, she arrived at a point where she could no longer experience sufficient newness from her work. One could say that an artist survives by continuously creating new works of art. So she began to doubt whether she can continue to survive as an artist while still being constrained to this single material. Determined to survive, she decided to introduce a radical shift in her practice. Unwilling to shift her choice of material, she decided to shift the physical scale of her work to a size significantly larger than she had previously attempted.

Soon after she introduced a scale-shift in her practice, she confronted an unexpected challenge. As she began to construct works of art that were significantly larger, an element she had all but ignored thus far reared its ugly head: an element called gravity. As she attempted to make work that stood tall, gravity dragged it down. As she attempted to make work that stood broad, gravity made it slouch. It was an experience that made her seriously wonder if it was time for her to give up the limitation of being constrained to this single material. It all but seemed inevitable that her survival as an artist would soon otherwise come to an end. It was only after she had completed a new body of work that she came to realize that overcoming such threat to one’s survival is critical to creating works of art that are surprisingly new to the creator and, as an extension, to the audience.

There is a time when an other previously considered unworthy of recognition rises to become a formidable opponent. At this juncture, we are forced to confront this other as there forms a threshold between them and ourselves. She would like to call this the Threshold of Respect. To cross this threshold, we must not only recognize the existence of this other, but also learn to respect them. It is no easy task to respect our opponent. However, if we can respect them, we can also leverage them as helpers instead of opponents. In other words, we can produce output that is possible precisely because of their existence. Since we never anticipated their existence prior to producing such output, their form necessarily sits beyond the boundaries of our imagination and is thus naturally surprisingly to us as creators. This exhibition is a collection of output that were produced as a byproduct of my exploration into this phenomena.

Sponsor: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism / Seoul Metropolitan Government / Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.


About the artist:
Yong Joo Kim is a Society of Arts and Crafts (SAC) and NICHE award-winning artist with an extensive record of exhibitions across Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. She is considered a pioneer in the use of hook-and-loop fasteners as material for art. Her work crosses the genre of both wearable sculpture and installations. She has been a featured speaker at premier conferences and exhibitions such as the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) and Sculpture Objects Functional Art and design (SOFA). Her work appears in the permanent collection of Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Art Bank (MMCA), and Velcro Group.