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ONLINE EXHIBITION
For over a decade, Semine Yang's practice has been shaped by an interest in the natural world and our inextricable place in its ecology. Referencing often-overlooked organic matter, such as insects and weeds, her paintings reflect an acute sensitivity to time. Its constant evolutions and revolutions are captured through a variety of means. The artist’s recent paintings are the product of a more instantaneously, process-based, and overall holistic approach.
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Semine Yang Studio Visit with Franck Gautherot, co-founder/director of Le Consortium
Artist Film Part I -
Semine Yang: The Next Wave
Artist Film Part II -
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The theme of metamorphosis, repetition and difference, is particularly present in Yang’s Dragonfly series, a meditation on light, color, weight, volume, and form – the fundamentals of painting. These entomologically inspired compositions likewise begin as digital drawings before they are translated back into the material and organic world, becoming a surface for the artist’s associative and intuitive experimentations that are reflected in the titles of each work.
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"I try to grasp what could be a method, a process, even a formal strategic vision. To think in colors, the features of diffraction of objects mutated in new bodies."
— Semine Yang
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Alongside paintings like Constellation or Disco-ripple, are a sub-series of ‘K-Painting’ dragonflies which jovially marry Korean and Occidental cultural references. Alluding to the South Korean musical genre inspired by successful 90’s teen boy and girl-bands in the West, K-Pop has become an industry of its own, manufacturing successful musical groups almost formulaically.
These dragonflies adopt anthropomorphic qualities and are rendered in primary colors, a nod to the Bauhaus and Abstract Expressionist schools, as well as the traditional Korean color spectrum Obangsaek, composed of white, black, red, blue, and yellow.
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In the monochromatic paintings Doodle Waves III and Spiral, the cyclicality of time is expressed gesturally. Inspired by the ebb and flow of a roiling ocean, and the force of energy that builds and crashes in waves, the artist seeks to track this motion in a single line, resulting in a series of hypnotic works that are more somber in tone, in part due to the colder months during which they were realized.
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"My mind compels me to sing of shapes changed into new bodies."
Metamorphoses, Ovid
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The way that the seasons permeate and index Yang’s paintings can also be seen in the contrasting festival landscapes Rollercoaster I and Hot Breeze. Working on a tablet, the artist is free to transcribe her physical surroundings and the sensorial associations they evoke in one fell swoop. These surreal topographies are charged with a certain levity and immediacy, transforming them from the plane of pure representation to objects that channel the smells, tastes, and inner life of the artist from one particular point in time to another.
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