Lu Potemka & Daniel Thalheim
In the exhibition „Memoryscape“ Yim Young Ju shows landscapes – the urban as well as the rural space. The starting point of the series is a „moon settlement“ in Incheon. Moon settlements are similar in appearance to German allotments, only without any vegetation to speak of. Basically, they are ghettos. The connotation with a rapid crime rate in the moon settlements, however, is not comparable with that of Germany: „I landed in Gwangju, in search of an artist supply store by chance in a moon settlement. There were hardly any people to be seen. I approached the first person I met and asked for an artist supply/frame maker (the man spoke no English, I spoke no Korean), I described what I was looking for with my hands and feet and, in doubt whether he had understood me correctly, was led to another place in the moon settlement. There I was introduced to another man, also with no knowledge of English, who again took me to another spot and so it went two more times. Neither of them could speak English and with each change of person and the way that went with it, I found it harder to find my way around. The matter began to get queasy. Finally I landed at the other edge of the moon settlement with a carpenter who could help me. These helpful men had understood what I was looking for and gave me their time, knowing that I would never find the carpenter alone. They were very courteous and polite people. I observed on this „excursion“ that many people in the Moon Settlement were doing crafts and repairs, and artists had their studios in and around the Moon Settlements, and unlike the (richer) neighborhood where my hotel was located, many elderly people also lived in the Moon Settlement.“
The Trauma of Satellite Cities
But back to Yim Young Ju. In the seventies, when he was a child, there were many workers living there, because South Korea was still a poor country. His parents both went to work in the city during the day. Yim Young Ju was left to his own devices and grew up with other children in the yards of the Moon Settlement. The places shown in the paintings are therefore personal, experienced and remembered places, „internalized places of human experience,“ as he himself describes it, where past and present coexist. In these residential areas exist absolute systems with their own rules, which he captures visually. He saw parallels to this in Lößnig, a Leipzig neighborhood that was his first stop in life in Leipzig. In the prefabricated buildings he found there, he draws a line to his life experiences in the Mondsiedlung, and this also made the urban landscape of Lößnig, as a German fringe society, attractive to him as pictorial content. Here, completely different levels of interpretation play their roles. In the forward-looking style of real existing socialism, housing estates in cities such as Leipzig, Berlin, Magdeburg, Karl-Marx-Stadt and Rostock were regarded as the highest urban planning and socio-social goal to be achieved in order to offer working people prosperity. If we already know these urban developments from the social-reform ideas of the late 18th and early 19th century. Within this historical framework, we know that these settlements provide and allow to develop their very own structures, up to the dystopia of exclusion, physical and psychological violence and escalation – the best example is given by the incidents in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where Vietnamese guest workers were attacked and injured in their living quarters in a prefabricated housing estate in Rostock-Lichtenhagen by a mob radicalized by right-wing extremist ideas. The musicians of the British pop band Depeche Mode also describe their origins in a poverty-stricken satellite town near London as dreariness, as an experience of violence and filled with a coldness of feeling.
Yim Young Ju’s depictions of the landscape, however, are not about judgment. Marginalized societies exist in different milieus and institutions. Michel Foucault has assigned them the concept of „heterotropy,“ and the visualization of this is what the entire „Memoryscape“ cycle is about. Yim Young Ju selects according to the premise of whether a motif was part of his life or is part of his experience. He writes: „Heterotropy, to me, is different things that coexist in one place and can be interpreted ambiguously. We can’t (grasp) all these levels at the same time – but that’s what makes us human.“
Who is the artist?
Young Ju Yim was born in 1972 in Incheon, South Korea. He has lived and worked in Leipzig and Berlin since the early 2000s. He already studied B.F.A. Fine Art Education at IN HA University in Incheon from 1993 to 1998. From 2004 to 2009 he studied painting with Prof. Sighard Gille and Prof. Annette Schröter at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Since then he has been working as an independent artist.
Yim Young Ju’s paintings reflect his personal worlds of experience in a very poetic way. The contexts he draws on often relate to social, philosophical and even religious issues. He takes on the role of an observer, i.e. instead of brutely shouting out the primal reasons of life, he remains genteel in his artistic presentation, without omitting anything, without concealing what he has experienced. His two-world experience plays a supporting role both in his pictorial language and in his choice of subjects.
Yim Young Ju
Memoryscape
Malerei
Vernissage 6.10.2022
Ausstellung 7.10. – 17.12.2022
Galerie Potemka
Aurelienstr. 41
04177 Leipzig