SANGYOON YOON

Gallery chosun will host “Sine Cera”, Yoon Sang-yoon’s solo exhibition from May 25 to June 13, 2018. Yoon Sang-yoon is an artist who draws conceptual oil paintings with his right hand and spontaneous drawings with his left hand. The word Sine Cera, which means “without wax” in Latin, originated from ancient Roman period. Thin and light pottery considered to be workthy but not every potters were able to make them due to a lack of skill. And these deceitful potters applied wax on the pottery surface to hide the cracks. In the opposite true potters sought to ensure the authenticity of their perfection by using the phrase ’ Sine cera ’ meaning ’ no wax ’. In modern times, the term has become the root of word ‘sincerely’. Like this word, the artist wants to share the world of his skilled and sincere work through this exhibition.

Yoon Sang-yoon’s right hand painting has triple structure consisting of water, figures and structure on top of it. Three worlds coexist in one screen. In the bottom of the picture, there’s ID which represents the unconscious world and there’s Ego, which coordinates unconsciousness and the consciousness, and Supergo as the conscious self that we exercise every day. As the artist said, the water at the bottom means Ego, the submerged part of the water means Id, and the components above the water represent Supergour. The right hand paintings show the frequent conflicts and consensus points between consciousness and unconsciousness in our daily lives, depending on Freud’s psychoanalytical model. Yoon Sang-yoon’s left hand drawing is an example of the uniqueness of physical performance. This is linked to Marlice Merleau-Ponty’s “body as an involved subject to the world”. Compared to right-handed paintings, the left hand drawing is spontaneous and abstract. The faces of the figures in the drawings are transformed or simplified into unidentifiable forms. It’s a metaphor for Ponty’s concept of “la chair(flesh)”. Ponty argued that since the physical world and the body are made of the same material (flesh), the body and the world are not distinct. Since individuals in the drawing can not be specified and each person does not exist as a disconnected entity, it is possible to read characters in a drawing as an attempt to incorporate them into a part of the world, not a disconnected subject. And the audience facing the work will be a part of the world at the same time, because they are made of same material as well. As Ponty said, “Being seen and Seeing is being reversed, it’s hard to say who is seeing and which is being seen, ” If we can see through the primitive non-sensitive world behind visibility through the flesh and the physical sense as Ponty claims, this means we can sneek peek of the phyological world from Yoon sang-yoon’s left handed drawings.

Sine means ‘without’, Cera means ‘wax’. This cera, however, refers to a portrait cast in wax and is also used as a figurative noun for the face. So “sine cera” could also means ” wax-free ” and ” faceless. ” In Yoon Sang-yoon’s left handed drawings, there’s people with the non-recognizable faces. They do not want to end up in a visually distinguishable reality and want to be perceived as a sensibility from outside of the frame. If the pictures drawn with the right hand reveal a specific face and are a schematic of the Freudian view on the individual, the drawings drawn with the left hand are not dependent or explained by any system but rather exist as a hint that world is made of same material. Looking at Yoon Sang-yoon’s right hand painting and the left hand drawing is like looking at the Freudian world and Ponty’s world. Yoon Sang-yoon holds a special position in contemporary art history as using two different methodologies simultaneously while exploring the same reality.