"The work I’m showing, A Portal To Repetition (2022) is a part of my on-going series, Idling Conversations, of which the main goal is to liberate art from its fate as a communicative medium. My paintings in a form of installation, generate relationships with one another creating a state of flux - an ecosystem, in which there are repetitions of circulations. It is one of the more experimental pieces I would say - considering the crude attachment of casters. I recall doing so because the work lost its part in the ecosystem I’ve envisioned, and by giving it implications of temporality and mobility, it found its position back into it"
Q: Can you describe your creative process and how you approach creating a new piece of art?
Jimin Yi Baek:
My creative process involves a lot of writing. Either raw or refined, collectively they appear through my work. I approach creating a new piece of art as treating another entity and with it, I experience interpersonal interactions. Through the interpersonal interactions, even more so than does the painting, I learn and unlearn - I shift.
Q: Are there particular themes or concepts that you explore in your work in general?
Jimin Yi Baek:
My work centers around broken and dismantled visual languages in painting, borrowing from discourses of abstraction. Crystallized images with unfit and misleading use of visual languages are then activated into a state of flux as they generate relationships with one another. The revolvency and repetition, however, persist to question; how would one work be NOT cohesive, without being cohesive about just that? The impossibility of the act becomes what self-sufficiently and obstinately facilitates my art practice. My work is thus a form and conceptual experiment destined to fail.
Q: Can you discuss any significant influences—artists, movements, or personal experiences—that have shaped your artistic style?
Jimin Yi Baek:
I’ve always admired my grandfather, Byungkook Yi’s paintings. I’m more and more learning the similarities between my works and my grandfather’s both in style and approach. I also find generational differences between the two - but the difference is what seamlessly connects the two practices together in time. This discovery was a confirmation for me that it is my vocation to carry out this part in life as an artist.
Q: Looking ahead, what are your future goals or projects as an artist? Are there any new directions or ideas you’re excited to explore?
Jimin Yi Baek:
I’m still dedicated to the Idling Conversations series. I’m working on a project under this concept that I’m planning to show sometime at the end of this year. This is another attempt in liberating art as a communicative medium. Another scheme destined to fail.
Jimin hopes to convey an experience of irony with a sensation of simultaneous emptiness and liveliness through her artworks: “The communicational outcome boils down to nothing yet, it perverse points to the liveliness of beings”.
A Portal to Repetition will be on view at Chelsea Walls until September 4th, 2024.