FICTIONAL TRUTH

About

I-MYU Projects presents Fictional Truth, a solo show of a Korean artist, Yujin Huh. The work introduces an idea of dislocation, fiction and process layered as mismatched entities, repetitions that render the representation of an image as an echo of a synthetic original. Huh Yu-jin's paintings blur the distinctions between image and reality, fiction and truth. The artist explores the dichotomy between the sublime and the mundane through a hyper-realist lens. She depicts the physical reality of familiar objects, directly referencing our common human experience. Her paintings of glass bottles articulate the internal world via the documentation of the artists' subjective experience. Her working process is meticulous but not mechanical, the artist's hand is nearly imperceptible. In the absence of expressionistic mark-making the viewer is forced to look harder. The first artistic intervention we notice is in scale; small and insignificant objects are transformed into monumental images. The longer we look, the patience and sensitivity of the artist becomes apparent; colours are saturated, shadows defined, textures enhanced. Huh Yujin imagines the bottle as an icon of mass reproduction in modern society; its physical properties - reflective, hollow, and disposable - attain symbolic significance. In some paintings the bottles are full of liquid and have a heavy physicality; in others they are empty and ghost-like. The emotional connection between artist and object removes the bottle from its ordinary function. By imbuing the everyday product with meaning, Yu-jin revives our perception of the object as much as she revives the object itself. The bottle operates here as a container of real and false images of reality, an extinguishable empty container.