Various Small Fires is pleased to present a two-person exhibition by Jungyoon Hyen and Mark Yang in its Seoul space. Like the exhibition title Inanimatefy, a unique term coined by combining ‘inanimate’ with ‘~to make (-fy),’ both artists take away the subjects’ lives and grant new meaning to their existence. Two young Korean-born artists across different time zones show recent works sharing the same subject matter of the body, continuing their exploration in sculpture and painting. Their ‘inanimate-fying’ practices are accompanied by the writings of Nowk Choe and Minjoo Lee for the Seoul show.

Hyen and Yang's depiction of the anatomical fragments is not entirely unprecedented and the subject matter has attracted many artists historically. In Severed Limbs (1818) by French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault, the arrangement of arms and legs detached from a torso evokes more than just fear. The meticulous display of objects dividing the canvas plane is often considered Géricault's exploration of painting's formality. The works exhibited in Inanimatefy that borrow organic shapes—mainly referring to the human anatomy—have a closer correlation with formative language that emphasizes the intrinsic properties of each medium, e.g., the materiality of sculpture and the flatness of painting.

The male nude is Yang's constant and distinctive subject, but it carries a clearer role in his new works. Intertwined bodies pulling, pushing, and stacking within the frame, pay tribute to the artist's personal experience as a wrestler in his youth. Although the naked Asian men with lined eyes may tempt the viewer to focus on identity discourse, according to Yang, they exist as "planes and lines to fill the surface of the canvas." This intention has become more evident in the artist's work within the past year. As seen in Posteriors, the artist composes copious faceless figures to castrate the narrative that viewers may presume. The four alternating men cased within Boxed's canvas frame exist almost as a pattern from a distance. In Three Asleep, the placid curves running from the figures' crowns to buttocks resemble layers found in landscape paintings. Unlike the faces that implied specific interpretations in Yang's earlier works, they reappear here, functioning equivalent to other body parts as a visual form.

Occupying the gallery wall and floor space, Hyen's sculptures emit their ego. As a metaphor for the inevitable power struggle between society and individuals, the artist devises every exhibition as a collective story where each work plays a particular role. Departing from the system where they were once entangled with various gestures and gazes that resisted, confronted, contradicted, and observed each other, Hyen's new sculptures entail their own narrative through their distinctive materiality and form. The supple tree trunks squeezing their way out through the confined iron fences that the artist encounters every day in Seoul's urban streets are transformed into flesh and metallic skeletons.

In Hyen's works, every amalgam of materials with contrasting textures cultivates respective tension and emotion. On the wall, both I got over you (almost) and I got over you explicitly expose the discomfort caused by the physical strife of iron rods skewing into two somatic masses resembling human torsos. Moreover, the sculptures overlaid with an ephemeral gesture suggest the possibility of a new relationship. Hyen's metal chains—which, in her previous works, were once used to restrain two pieces together or as the vertical axis of a hand-standing being—have now seemingly found a way to be comfortably symbiotic, displaying fluid movement.

- Curator, Hayoung Chung

Photography by VSF