YI HWAN KWON

The distorted sculptures of Yi Hwan Kwon display a parallel universe where ocular reality and perceptual accords of conformity are absurdly bended. They provoke a visual experience in space and time, where our eyes seem to navigate familiar objects and people only for the first time, and our predicated perception must freshly adjust.

The compression of distance, space and time in Yi's freeze-frame world is in reference to the elongated world appearing on television when wide-screen film is broadcast, and is an inquisitive attempt to inject vitality into the variable relationship between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional realms. The outstretched and flattened shapes, which are molded from digitally-manipulating thousands of photographs, perhaps present a contemporary solution in reinterpreting forms and relativity of space not unlike the exercises of Alberto Giacometti. Trained in Seoul in environmental sculpture, Yi's coveted works hold an innate consideration of the existing environment, and at the same time, emphasize the discovery of new interactive relationship between human and land, natural and artifice, illusion and reality.