Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Yeesookyung (1963-) is a Korean artist active on the international contemporary art scene. Born in Seoul, the accomplished artist graduated from Seoul National University’s College of Fine Arts. She is especially good at using Ready-Mades in her narratives and cleverly employs different media and their various significances in her work. Her past work has dealt with her reflections on cultural identity under globalization through sculpture, painting, video, and installation art. Since her first solo show in Seoul and Tokyo in 1992, Yeesookyung has garnered attention with her unique artistic language, which won her ticket to prestigious international art shows. Some notable group exhibitions in which her work has appeared include the Liverpool Biennale (Liverpool, UK), the Mediations Biennale (Poznan, Poland), Fragile-Fields of Empathy (Museum of Modern Art of Saint Etienne,Saint Etienne, France), Dual Natures in Ceramics (SFO Museum,San Francisco, USA), The Diverse Spectrum: 600 Years of Korean Ceramics (Museum of Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil), and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (Echigo-Tsumari, Japan). She was also among the artists invited to exhibit in the Asian Art Biennale in 2014 organized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung, Taiwan) and the K-P.O.P.─Korean Contemporary Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Taipei, Taiwan).Her works can be found in the collections of the following institutions: National Museum of Contemporary Art (Gwacheon, Korea), Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), Boston Museum of Contemporary Art (Boston, USA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, USA), Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, USA), and Bristol Museum (Bristol, UK), among others. The current exhibition When I Become You was hosted at the Daegu Museum, Korea, before arriving at MOCA, Taipei. Presented in the form of a dialogue, the show showcases the transformation from subject to object. In the process of “dialogue and transformation,” the artist revisits the duality of “East and West,” “Tradition and Modernity,” “Consciousness and Subconsciousness,” and hopes to explore and confirm how contemporary culture and historical traditions are not mutually exclusive but can in fact coexist. This show focuses on the transformation from subject and object, and also reflects upon tradition from a contemporary viewpoint while deriving new meanings from tradition. Yeesookyung strives to create works that embody the artistic principle where art germinates first from dialogue, is then removed from its original context, is further transformed, and results in an innovative form. Translated Vase Series, which bridges the traditional and the contemporary; Island Adventure, a video installation that comments on the encounter between East and West; Daily Drawing Series, which uncovers the power of the subconscious; Her new works for the MOCA,Taipei include When I Become You, a collaborative piece with Ming Hwa Yuan Taiwanese opera actors; Learning from the Masters, in which she hails the late Taiwanese artist Max Liu (1912-2002) as her model; and The Very Best Statue, an assemblage of images of religious figures based on surveys of local audiences in Taiwan.