Whisper Only to You.
From an idea by Sylvain Bellenger and Andrea Viliani with Sabrina Rastelli

Name: Whisper Only to You.
Start: 2019-10-12 00:00:00
End: 2020-01-13 00:00:00
Location: Madre - Donnaregina Museum of Contemporary Art

Madre - Donnaregina Museum of Contemporary Art

Naples, Campania, Italy

Curated by: Sabrina Rastelli, Andrea Viliani

The show

The Donnaregina Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte present "Whisper Only to You", the first solo exhibition of the South Korean artist Yeesookyung (Seoul, 1963) in two Italian public institutions, born from an idea by Sylvain Bellenger and Andrea Viliani with Sabrina Rastelli, curated by Sabrina Rastelli and Andrea Viliani for the Madre · Donnaregina contemporary art museum.

Yeesookyung is a visual artist whose practice includes the use of different media, including video-installation and painting, with a predilection for sculpture.

The Facade del Madre rooms house some works that belong to the artist's multimedia and multi-material production. Whisper Only to You (2019), which gives its title to the exhibition itself, is composed of the recording of a performance by Yeesookyung , whose voiceover whispers, in Korean, an endless story, while the images show the details of a drawing in cinnabar red. - precious pigment of mineral origin, full of symbolic meanings in the East - titled Flame . As Buddhist monks focus on a single question in their path to enlightenment, in making this overwhelming and disturbing drawing the artist kept asking himself "What is the flame?", While the brush, guided by the mantra, almost automatically generated pictures. Thousand Leaves (2018) is a folding screen flanked by a tree root and its reproduction made with a 3D printer and painted in imitation of wood. The passage of time is crystallized in the old root, whose natural energy is revitalized by the sculpture, the latter being the artificial duplication of the first and second component of a couple, in a process of regeneration which, combining opposites and differences, tends to immortality. The two elements are joined by a screen whose folding doors are covered with white silk of different shades, a metaphor for the myriad of leaves that are born and die during the life of a tree.

In Korea, white is the color of death, which, however, is followed by rebirth: the different shades of white therefore allude to the various states of the soul. Bari (2019) is a 3D printed sculpture based on a drawing by the artist depicting Bari, the "Abandoned Princess" who, in Korean mythology, sacrifices herself by marrying the god of the underworld to learn the secret with which she will bring back to life the parents; she is considered the ancestor of shamans. Moonlight Crown (2018-ongoing) is a series of sculptures, exhibited in absolute preview, which draws inspiration from an interview released by the American writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1973: "if the truth exists, it is as intricate and hidden as a crown of feather ". The basis of each of the five works exhibited at the Madre museum consists of a crown supporting a densely decorated sphere, on which a cuspid element rests. Ubiquitous symbols are incorporated, such as angels, praying hands, dragons: if in the past these emblems were perceived as sublime and powerful, and therefore used only in the sacred sphere, today their repetitive use has made them easily accessible, emptying them of their transcendent meaning. . The decontextualized sacred emblems are here arranged in such a way as to build an organic structure and reveal the hidden links between past and present, myth and history: the Moonlight Crownds thus become the crowning glory of our individual spirituality. Finally, the acrylic on canvas Past Life Regression Painting_Saint, Making a Crystal Ball with the Impurity of the World (2015) is inspired by an experience of regressive hypnosis, thanks to which the artist tried to re-emerge the traces of previous lives imprinted on his subconscious.

In these works Yeesookyung personally declines the theme of the transmigration of souls, typical of Eastern thought. A work from the Translated Vase series, for which the artist is known internationally, completes the exhibition at the Madre. The project, inaugurated in 2002 and still in progress, consists in the creation of sculptures and installations obtained by assembling shards, splinters and fragments of works by Korean potters specialized in the reproduction of pottery of the Goryeo (918-1392) and Joseon (1392-) dynasties. 1910). In these works there emerges a research oriented to the creation of narratives that are even only possible but starting from the existing, whether it is an artifact or a reminiscence, in an attempt to restore dignity to the vulnerability of the object and of the individual's experience, between fact and hypothesis, history and narration. The fragmentation of the experience and the attempt to recover it translate into the restoration of the shattered vessel through welding, as well as of the layer of consciousness through analysis, in a constant tension towards sublime beauty.

The exhibition at the Madre museum will be completed with a performative event in the spring of 2020.