Yunhee Min
Yunhee Min, Vitreous Opacities (Double Floor #2, side a), 2021. Enamel, acrylic on tempered starphire glass with custom aluminum frame. Courtesy the artist.
I like to think of visual abstraction as an invitation. An invitation for a chance experience and as a resistance to meaning or interpretation. I approach abstraction as a relational dynamic, hence always involved in some sense of movement and time. In studio, making abstraction is anything but abstract. This making involves physical and bodily entanglement with materials and processes that evolve over time.
Color aligns with abstraction in its inherent multiplicity. It fascinates me to consider the infinitely complex and delicate contingency that makes our perception of color possible even as they constantly shift in ways that may not be perceptible. So, it is not surprising that color is also deeply aligned to the senses, and to the body.
Vitreous Opacities (Double Floor #2) is an example from the recent group of paintings on glass. Taking wet paint to the surface of glass, the work explores liquidity of paint, gesture, and color relationships as well as ideas of composition and transparency. The process of pouring, spilling, tilting, dripping of liquid paint feels as though they are on the verge of chaos, losing its edges and character as color and form. With time, I am left with a myriad of visual/chemical effects that are intensified through the luster of the glass.
Abstraction conjures distance at first glance. It is also a way to make new spaces to take place.
Recently, I was a captive in a hotel room in Berlin after having contracted Covid. During the ensuing days of isolation, I spent time reading. When I was asked to participate in this conversation about Asian-American Art, I couldn’t help wanting to retrieve the feelings of Badiou’s words on love. Profoundly built on experiencing otherness and difference, his thoughts offer ways to imagine and reimagine. Among other things, I thought about love in my own life, as a person, an artist and a maker. In Badiou’s words, “What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity?” (Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, 22)
— Yunhee Min
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