Translated Vase: The Unruly Ceramics of Yeesookyung
What happens when culture and tradition are translated from one form to another in an attempt at legibility? This is a question at the forefront of Korean multidisciplinary artist Yeesookyung’s practice. The fissures that occur during the process of that translation are made literal and material in Yee’s bulbous ceramic sculptures.
Translated Vase (TVW1), 2015, ceramic shards, epoxy, 24k gold leaf, 65 x 43 x 43 inches
The verb “to glean” has two meanings: on the one hand, to discover and make clearer, bit by bit; on the other, to collect the scraps of food or other material left behind in the wake of markets or harvests. Since 2001, Yee has channeled this dual meaning through her work, traveling to ceramics workshops across Korea to collect porcelain fragments of pottery that have been cast aside due to imperfections. The artist then grafts the scraps to one another to create dynamic new forms, their hybrid nature revealed through Yee’s use of 24-karat gold leaf along the glued seams.
Translated Vase (TVW24), 2014, ceramic shards, epoxy, 24K gold leaf, 51 x 35 1/2 x 35 1/2 inches
In her use of existing material and tradition to create new forms, Yee’s practice stretches simultaneously into the past and toward the future; now her work also reaches across the globe in simultaneous exhibitions in Philadelphia and Venice. Yee is a featured artist in the 57th Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, and is the subject of a solo exhibition, Translated Vase, on view at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia through June 30.
Translated Vase highlights Yee’s gold-seamed sculptural forms—ranging in scale from miniscule to massive—as well as works on paper and silk. At Locks, audiences are the beneficiaries of the gallery’s intimate presentation of Yee’s work as well as of the depth and breadth of her extensive practice. Sixteen years into the development of her translated vases, Yee has decisively hit her stride, showcasing works in a wide range of size, scope, material, color, and form.
Translated Vase, Five Elements, 2015, 11 x 10.5 x 11 cm; 7 x 8 x 8.7 cm; 8 x 7.5 x 8 cm; 1 x 7.2 x 6.8 cm; 3 x 5.5 x 5 cm
Translated Vase (TVW27), 2014, ceramic shards, epoxy, 24K gold leaf, 17 1/2 x 25 1/4 x 20 1/2 inches
Yee’s use of the term “vase” to describe this range of ceramic work actually belies the extent to which the sculptures differ formally both from the Platonic shape of a vase as well as from one another. Yee has described the translated vases as “mutants or hybrids.” The way they expand and bubble out into space recalls cells dividing and multiplying, as if cancerous; the works have a devious lifelike quality all their own. That there is also this underlying current of the monstrous or diseased in Yee’s elegant forms allows this body of work to exist as real bodies do: as difficult, beautiful forms whose insides are unknowable.
Translated Vase (TVGW4), 2015, ceramic shards, epoxy, 24K gold leaf, 22 3/4 x 22 x 23 1/2 inches
Yeesookyung’s wide-ranging practice traffics in and complicates several binaries: fragment and whole, ancient and contemporary, trash and treasure, low and high, local and global. In simultaneous presentations at Locks Gallery and at the Pavilion of Traditions in the 2017 Venice Biennale, Yeesookyung’s work exists in this plurality, never sacrificing beauty or conceptual rigor for the sake of a straightforward resolution.
