Changchang Yoo works with video or music playing in the background. When his set playlist of songs or sequence of videos play through and the studio is abruptly filled with silence, he encounters a cacophonous negative wall of sound that quickly disturbs his inner silence. He becomes overcome with thoughts and feelings that speak over each other, vying for continuity. What are they and where do they come from? Yoo cautiously answers both with 'something accumulated throughout my life'.
All Yoo's paintings this exhibition flow and swell from the monsoon of voices that wash over him in moments of broken silence. His exclamatory exhibition title Oh! Silence eddies in pools of awe, admiration, and lament. The artist's inner dialogue comes forth as a singular character manifestation on canvas. However, the form, expression, and energy of those characters vary. Some share certain traits, but the artist intends for them to be individual every time. The self is more likely to be a multiplicity of selves, each with personalities and complex feelings that are distinct enough to be separate, but not enough to be described in words. To those selves, the artist wished to offer hundreds, maybe even a thousand stories and feelings to flesh them out as their own characters. They simply had no other way to be.
The artist's 'Why!' series of paintings show several characters reacting to the same situation, in different ways. However, that difference in retrospect is well within the interpretable breadth of pressing for 'why' to someone off-screen. It is a series that spotlights the relationship between action and reaction. Someone speaks to them from across the table, and they each look back with a response, but their expressions are not the same. Emotions and responses such as surprise, anger, and curiosity trace the range of possible reactions to the same situation. Perhaps the same words are spoken but with different inflections and tenor, earning these differently nuanced responses. A femur-like bone hinders a direct view of the figure on screen, as the artist wanted to create a barrier for the viewer. The foreign ashen object in the foreground immerses by creating necessary distance from the canvas, and the artist believes the distancing device enriches the painting.
Changchang Yoo explains that he emphasises figures because they are where his paintings start. The figures start unplanned—like the rest of his work—and rely on the inner expression of characters on as they take shape on canvas. They seem to have will and agency, doing as they would on screen, spontaneously inviting other characters to join them. Mise-en-scène is French for putting on stage, and the artist's placement of the figures on the canvas stage upon the backdrop of succeeding background and colour creates exactly that: a mise-en-scène. These set stages can be beautiful, unsettling, sad, happy, obscene, or hilarious, and they always tell a story. The stage is put-on around the main character, and that character is fleshed out a stroke at a time. This process also inspires the title upon the artist, who likens them to lines of dialogue in theatre plays, completing the essential of stage play.
Two figures in embrace in Hug, looking in other directions. Changchang Yoo who likes to draw shoulders, drew a right angle shaped like 7 on canvas, which led to a figure's face. The lines appeared to be embracing someone. From an abstract line to a figure, and then from one figure to two figures, he finished the painting and decided it should be a Hug. But there is more than one hug. The embrace may be for encouragement, for greeting, for displaying affection. My Picnic shows a male and two female figures enjoying a picnic conversation with great exuberance, but Yoo has spread the picnic over a grave, and the picnicking figures are entirely disrobed. Is this put-on-stage one of tragedy or comedy? Is it melodramatic, fantastic, horrific, or simply enigmatic? The artist wished to present a scene that mixed genres. Perhaps it is closest to black comedy.
Changchang Yoo's complex and oddly nuanced paintings reflect life; that of many of others as well as those many within him. The ineffability of those affected moments in life are bound to be more than a matter of momentary feeling. It draws from the accumulated experience of years and decades that add dimensions of complexity and nuance. The artist does not abridge or abstract them but chooses to paint them as they are. The characters in the paintings are not gentle, but they are charming. The mise-en-scènes are full of double meaning, while subversive use of unsettlingly bright colours set a mood of ghoulish peculiarity and bizarre polish. None of it is sophisticated, but what is put on stage is completely energetic.
Press release courtesy GALLERY2.
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