Yong Joo Kim
Jeweller
Published: 02.04.2024
yongjookim.com
Bio
A native of Seoul, Korea, Yong Joo Kim received her MFA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA in Arts and Crafts (Metals and Textiles) from Sook Myung Women’s University. She 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), Seoul Museum of Craft Art, Pureun Cultural Foundation, and Velcro Group.
Statement
What does it mean for us to survive?For me, making art is a way of exploring this simple yet complex question.
I focus primarily on a single material of choice: hook and loop fasteners. The choice to create jewelry out of an inexpensive material often considered unattractive and mundane was originally inspired by two reasons. On the one hand, it was to survive financially by keeping material costs down. On the other hand, it was to challenge my ability to survive in a field known for its use of attractive and precious materials. What I have since learned is that the creative process is also something that requires survival.
In the creative process, we often get stuck. When we do, we feel as if there is a finite limit to our ability to create. To survive the creative process is to continue to feel alive when we get stuck by not giving up. To do this, we must be able to embrace and appropriately respond to a variety of unpleasant surprises, so as to overcome them. What’s pleasantly surprising about this is that when we do, we often end up with art that defies our imagination. Art provides us with experiences of sublime, inspiration, and beauty, which helps us realize that there still exists infinite possibilities. I wish to share these experiences with those who witness or wear my work.
Overview: Requisite Variety
After graduation in 2009, I was left with a limited set of tools, resources, and finances. Such limitation made me search for an inexpensive material that I could shape with my bare hands. The material I chose was pieces of grey and black hook and loop fasteners.
Making art became a method of survival. The act of making breathed meaning and reason necessary for my psychological survival. The act of sharing my work with the world provided food, clothes and shelter necessary for my physical survival.
To more consciously explore the relationship between art and survival, I decided to limit myself to merely three distinct shapes of hook and loop fasteners. I wondered if I could survive with such harsh limitations.
As I started to experiment by generating many diverse sets of forms from one or more of the three shapes, I began to see an inextricable link between survival and mastery.
Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety states that only variety can absorb variety. What he means is that, in order to master any problem or process, we have to be able to bring more variety to bear than is inherent in the situation.
Think of two jazz players improvising: one plays a certain melody and another responds with a different melody. Even when an unexpected melody is played, a master improviser has the ability to choose the most appropriate response that expresses the feeling they desire while maintaining the integrity of the ensemble. In this regard, mastery is the stage that one reaches by acquiring a sufficient variety of responses that empowers one to deal with this kind of interaction.
If the jazz players’ continuous playing is analogous to me being able to keep generating new forms, could this be what it means to survive? Could the process of survival be inextricably linked to the process of achieving mastery?
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Think of beans, straws, pins, nails, velcro, snaps, cable ties, and electric caps. These objects are not normally considered beautiful or valuable. I explore the value of such mundane objects and discover their hidden beauty through a process of reconfiguration. Think of the velcro: a long strip of rough, bland, and industrial objects, seen on shoes, bags, watches, and at the grocery store. As I pay close attention to it and its system of organization in my environment, I find new ways of looking, new ways of decomposing and composing them, and new ways of creating a relationship between it and our body. My work introduces the unconventional use of familiar artefacts into a world full of conventions.
By assembling, grouping, clustering, and piling, the simple elements become complex and give rise to the unexpected. As the wearer approaches my work, their perspective shifts and sudden realizations spark wonder, discovery, tension, joy and play. My investigation of creation, innovation, and transformation questions the definition of value and provides a never-ending field for invention.
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