Yun's installations are "inhabited by dreams in which sensations of strangeness and ubiquity intersect as in the dream experience, and translate the everyday world subjectively."
Olesya Turkina
Curator at the Russian National Museum, St Petersburg
The "secret garden" is a sheltered corner, a place of forgetfulness and magical torpor, a reminder of the future and a forecast of the past. Here there is no alternation of day and night - a "black" light, rhythmically distributed by flashes of visual projections, uniformly illuminates the entire space.
There is no place here for the usual ordering of things. On the branches of the almond tree in bloom, instead of fruit, there are screens with images of the naked artist levitating above the passing water. The sound of a waterfall is mixed with gusts of wind. Video projections bloom among artificial flowers. Aiyoung Yun metaphorically calls her installation, Secret Garden, a dream. "All night long in my dreams I swim like a fish, I fly in the clouds like a bird... My soul rises with the wind, not knowing what it will encounter... and where to find the meaning of life... The "garden" represents my dreams, and the trees with the images my
soul," she says.
The secret garden is a poetic metaphor embodied by Yun in a multimedia installation. The space of the "secret garden" is filled with "real" objects, transparent video images, and sounds. These images, such as a character hovering in the air, or a traveler on foot, have multiple meanings. "Many of the images I use in my videos have no concrete meaning, they allow me to convey feelings and impressions that I could not describe or show otherwise. Video is an ideal medium for this" (dixit the artist). In any case, it can be said that the image of the traveler is linked to the metaphorical representation of the artist in "the endless journey, when we don't know where we are going", in which Yun's admiration for Krishnamurti's philosophy is reflected. The representation of the artist herself, appearing repeatedly in the video installations, symbolizes her division between the Aiyoung Yun who lives in real time and the Aiyoung Yun who exists in dreams, fantasies, and memories. Speaking of this installation the artist recalls the renowned Chuan Tzu, when the philosopher, suddenly waking up, wonders if he is Chan Tzu who slept and saw himself in a dream as a butterfly or a butterfly who dreams of Chuan Tzu. Tangible objects such as the tree and flowers, bring the artist "back to earth" to the material world of logic and consciousness. The natural sounds of water and wind symbolize for Yun the unconscious world that could be glimpsed by following "the royal road of dreams".
Memories and dreams are the raw material of the artist. After growing up in Seoul, Yun has been living and working in Paris for more than 10 years, with the feeling of wandering in the intellectual no-mans land between East and West. In his enchanting multimedia installations, the viewer feels like a traveler who has suddenly found himself in an enigmatic dreamland, where things change places, where the soul of the garden cultivates the soul of the viewer (Secret Garden, 2001), where a child walks endlessly through a landscape drowned in fog (Intersection, 2000).
Yun's installations are "populated by dreams in which the sensations of strangeness and ubiquity intertwine as in the dream experience, and translate the everyday world subjectively. The boundary between the real nature of the world and its deceptive nature, between reality and dream, is materialized in the three-dimensional space of a "dark" room, where sculpture and video-performance, immobile objects and moving images, are united. Video art has become a unique medium for Yun to embody the moment of time rendered. The artist began working with video in the mid-1990s, making time one of the subjects of his creative work. Video art is one of the most revolutionary achievements of the 20th century, which, like cinema in its time, has changed the very relationship to reality, giving the viewer the opportunity to perceive artworks in "real time.
For Yun the metaphor of time is the river, continuing its path, or a cloud drifting in the sky, the cycle of birth and disappearance. Video has allowed him to embody the multiple dimensions of the world, the possibility of existing simultaneously in several parallel spaces, especially in the space of dreams and imagination. The topography of her multimedia installations is the Secret Garden of memories, scrupulously reconstructed by means of video projections, lasers, three-dimensional images, and sounds, where everyone feels like a traveler wandering in the depths of time rendered by the artist.
Olesya Turkina
Curator of the Russian National Museum, St Petersburg