Youngsun Jin: A New Discourse Between Fresco and New Media

Thalia Vrachopoulos


If the criteria
for judging quality art are still comprised of a brilliant concept coupled with
fine execution then Channeling Time: Youngsun Jin is among the noteworthy exhibitions
in London today. Jin masterfully revises fresco with new working methodologies
and formats to enliven traditional fresco. By creating transportable formats
such as folding screens or independent sculptures she releases fresco from its
historical role as architectural decoration. One of Jin’s pieces Site of
Time, 1997 is a large independent three-dimensional spherical sculpture upon
whose armature, are secured convex and concave rectangular fresco fragments.
Painted with abstract designs alluding to galaxies and planets, these tablets
are attached to the interior as well as the exterior surface of the globe and
evoke continuity or duration and the life cycle.

Jin has devised new ways to apply print media such as silk-screening on fresco
to create multiples thereby suspending previously held expectations about originality.

Reproduction is
evident in Jin’s TVs: Between Heaven and Earth, 2000 a sculpture consisting
of twelve identical fresco televisions with inserted sliding screens. Due to
the solidity of the televisions’ skeletons and the portability of the sliding
inserted screens Jin juxtaposes temporality with impermanence. These units are
situated in three rows of four televisions each that gradually develop top to
bottom from representational to abstract in style. The top row’s first panel
is earthen toned and contains a geographic map associated with the material realm
scratched onto its surface. The second is a viridian panel that depicts musical
scales in sharp recession with sgrafittoed notes beginning on the left as readable
signs, which transform into scratches as they recede into the background. It’s
as if in recalling the intensity of Beethoven’s Fifth to which Jin refers
the musical signs become transformed into emotional gestures. In the next viridian
screen Jin has depicted Myung Hoon Chung the Korean conductor with baton in hand
directing the Paris

Bastille Opera.
On the last earth-tone panel she has scratched medieval scales of Gregorian musical
notations juxtaposed against illuminated manuscript scrolls of the four apostles.
In these panels Jin alludes both to spirituality and music as well as engaging
with rich historical developments. The second row of screens is comprised of
four panels executed with expressionistic strokes in shades of black, white and
gray whose gestural movement suggests static interference and electronic snow.