Jason Yi's work accumulates multiple perspectives. At its core, however, lies an investigation into the structure and shaping of identity through ancient mythology, personal memory, and lived experience. One might also see his photographs, videos, and installations as metaphors about tradition and modernity, negotiating between past and future.

This dichotomy has been a tangible part of Yi's life. He and his family immigrated to the United States from Korea when he was eleven years old. Assimilating to his adopted culture Yi had a seemingly easy time fitting into the fabric of American society, while his parents held on to their traditional Korean values. As with most children of immigrants, though, the initial indifference toward his cultural heritage was replaced by a deep curiosity about his roots, which, in recent years, has increasingly found expression in Yi's art.

The video animation, Looking for Plum Blossoms (1999-2002), should be viewed as a defining moment in the evolution of Yi's work. Appropriating an 18 th -century Korean painting, the short piece signals the artist's fascination with how traditional Asian representations of landscape might trigger memories and/or stories. As a consequence, landscapes have become main characters in Yi's various bodies of works. For instance, his classically beautiful and seemingly timeless photographs from the series, The Way Things Used To Be (2003), produced during a residency in Japan, involve contemporary reenactments of traditional Asian narratives, in which the settings--huge boulders in the middle of a stream or a dense bamboo forest--take on narrative qualities themselves. Split in this way between tradition and innovation, the photographs have an expectant quality, as if something is going to happen that never quite does. A similar bifurcation--here on a material level--takes place in Yi's installation of wall-mounted mountains made of white packing peanuts. In these stunning abstract forms Yi harnesses the magical beauty of the spectacularly jagged peaks of traditional Asian landscapes, leaving it up to the viewers to fill in their own stories.

Throughout his work Yi seeks to offer the poetics of place and people instead of sentimentality, which is epitomized in Familiar (2006) , video of campfire embers disappearing into the night sky. The magic of the place seems true to life, as the young man from the voice-over attempts to sift his memories--in the moment of recollecting, glossing and jumbling things together.

Andrea Inselmann - Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art - Cornell University

 

 

READ a spotlight preview of Mary L. Nohl Fellowship Exhibition by Mary Louise Schumacher / Visual Art writer at Milwaukee Journal Sentinel