Biography:
Min Yoon (b. 1986, Cheon-An, KR) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Using "artistic materials" for his drawings, paintings, and sculptures, these same materials reappear as objects and crucial motifs in his works. Often arranged into installations, they revolve around the "nature" of artistic work and its representations. Selected exhibitions include: Perspective + ing, Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich, CH (2024); Mind Hours Hand Minutes, Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin, DE (2023); Neue Ambitionen, Bundeskanzleramt, Vienna, AT (2023); A Scene for 210cm, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, DE (2021); Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna, AT (2019).
Works:
Min Yoon, Untitled, 2024
leather and thread
175 x 56 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Min Yoon, Untitled, 2021
leather, thread and rope
dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Almost everyone picks up a leaf at some point and then leaves it on the ground. Other leaves end up between the pages of books. They remain as a trace of the movements of everyday life: picked up on the way to school, to work, to home, or to a better life. Min Yoon's production of leather leaves began during his student years. They document the to-and-fro of his daily motion through the landscapes of various cities: the shed leaves of trees in different districts of Vienna or the harbingers of autumn collected in South Korea. One "work" after another, the untitled leaves are the result of repetitive hand sewing. The manufacturing process of the commercial raw material used for the leaves causes damage, scratches, and occasional holes on the back. Due to the folds and warping of the thin material, both sides of the leather are visible in Yoon's work. In earlier "weathered" leaves, the artist pushed these surfaces even further into a state of decay by punching more holes or by staining them with coffee. For the Forms of Shadow exhibition, Yoon resumed work on an unfinished piece from the past to be presented alongside older work with embossed shapes of oversized coins. The dots on the new leaf are photograms left by the shadows of circulating change from different countries: 1.310 Korean won, 45 euro and 32 cents, 8 Croatian kuna, 4 Danish krone, 30 Swiss centimes, and 6 United States cents were placed on the leaf, which was then left outside and faded in places by the sun. Looking at the leather leaves, the viewer may be reminded of the leaf as a loaded symbol in literature, art, and handicrafts, as well as the artistic work of children who create something with the materials gathered from their environment. With oversized versions, Yoon repeats the boundless symbolic and ornamental values of this sign in the coded and yet arbitrarily elastic discourse of contemporary art. The question is: why do we still pick leaves?
