June 12 – 23, 2019
2019년 6월 12– 23일
Flexspace, CICA Museum
Opening Party: Saturday, 3-5 pm, June 15, 2019
오프닝 파티: 2019년 6월 15일 3-5시, 토요일
Over the last three decades Phillia Yi has created a profound body of vibrant woodcuts exploring cultural roots that are at once personal and universal. In the process, she has developed her own printmaking techniques and a powerful visual language. While many artists are content to contribute to an established genre, Yi has discovered a unique way of adapting the conventions of printmaking to her distinctive aesthetic and conceptual vision.
It is rare to encounter work as fresh and exciting as Yi’s woodcuts. With her large woodblocks she has completely obliterated the size constraints that most printmakers accept as a limitation of the medium. Over her career she has created diptychs, triptychs and other prints with up to nine adjoining sections, resulting in some of largest woodcut images anywhere. Of course this would mean nothing if the prints were not compelling. Yi’s woodcuts are expressive, colorful, and beautifully nuanced symbolic abstractions imbued with an urgency and dynamism rarely matched. While printmaking is valued by the art world primarily as a way to make multiples, Yi prints only a few of her complex compositions. Printmaking, for her, provides a perfect marriage of medium and message.
Yi’s work is full of wonderful contradictions. It appears spontaneous, as if it were created with exuberant brushstrokes. Yet, to achieve this effect, Yi must cut meticulously through the surface of her woodblocks, carving out the area around each of these “strokes.” Her gorgeous colors, which appear to be as free-flowing as watercolors, are actually multiple veils of ink transferred from wood to paper with the utmost care. In her recent work she has sometimes introduced representational elements in stark contrast to their abstract surroundings. And, while her work is rooted in Far Eastern printing traditions, there are undeniably elements of American Abstract Expressionism.
Yi’s visual vocabulary of shapes and colors seems infinite, ranging from dominant opaque forms to the most subtle transparent shapes. However, it is what these forms convey that is most intriguing. They seem to reach beyond two-dimensional works on a wall, confronting the viewer with explosive force. This bursts of energy in these prints represent Yi’s ongoing response to her position as a human being straddling two worlds, the Korea of her youth and the United States of her adult life. The interplay between the forms – by turns peacefully intertwined or in fierce conflict with one-
another – nicely captures the possibilities and struggles inherent in her life and, by extension, in all of our lives. In an increasingly interrelated world, with cultures merging and clashing in commerce, war and personal lives, Yi’s work takes on an even greater symbolic significance.
Ron Netsky
-Art Critic, Professor Art, Chair of the Art Department, Nazareth College
My work is an expression of the external world of which I am a part and the internal world of my personal history and experience. As a woman from Korea living in the United States. I find myself caught between cultures and this isolates me in an interesting way. My work reflects the day to day dilemmas and tension of my multicultural experience. In my work, I bring together in complex relationships abstract imagery with elements that are representational. Both flat and illusory space is created suggesting an altered sense of time and scale. “Tight” movement is juxtaposed against that which is fluid or “painterly,” and the warm and the cool colors are varied between opaque and translucent layering. This activates the psychological space and grand sentimental movement that I am trying to achieve.
That which appears spontaneous in my work is carefully contrived by the subtractive nature of woodcut. Positive becomes negative and vice versa. Through my primary medium of woodcut, I use traditional techniques such as brush and ink, but I use them in a way that, while referring to the tradition, explores new possibilities. While the concept, rather than the technique, is the most important part of my work, it is also true that the complex techniques I use hold great importance to the content as they effect the “look” of the image. Content and technique are interdependent, each affecting the other giving richer meaning to the work. I have invented many of my own techniques in order to achieve certain visual, expressive effects.
I use sheets of 1/8” luan mahogany plywood and heavy rag paper. I love working with wood which has a basic human quality, that is natural, soft, and beautiful as indicated by the pattern and texture of wood grains. The effects of the plywood impressed onto heavy paper by way of its tactile and textural qualities make the visual experience even richer. The making of my woodblock prints is a labor-intensive process. Time and labor effect the work visually because the work is physical and the marks reflect my own body movements and energy. The results of my efforts have a peculiar aesthetic quality and differ from all other media. Naturally my shapes, forms, colors, and space evolve over to time; they seem to have a life and mind of their own.
Art both reflects and influences society and culture. In that sense, I feel artists have a responsibility to their generation not just to create objects of beauty, but to create objects of truth — whether they
be beautiful or not. My ideas and inspirations come from my daily life and my personal experiences, both good and bad. The most important characteristic of my approach to art is my belief that art should be expressed in terms of human experience. I believe true artistic expression will strengthen our future, and I hope my work to be a small contribution to the development of humanity and culture.
-Phillia C. Yi, John Milton Potter Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Art, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Purple Landscape II (2013)