Gold Award: A Young Yu
Dream of a Willow Tree,2020
Video still, 2.28 x 6.4″
Silver Award: Chang-Jin Lee
Floating Echo, gouache on watercolor paper, 6×8″
Bronze Award: Choen Pyo Lee
Untitled Piece for Copenhagen, 2018 Mixed media installation, Variable dimensions
Comments from the jurors
Bill Carroll Director, EFA Studio Program
A YOUNG YU, the Gold winner of the Contemporary Visual Art Awards, received her BFA from the Rhode Island of Design, her MFA from Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn. Having only graduated in 2019, she already has an impressive exhibition history, and was included in exhibitions at the Museum of Art and Design, and The Jewish Museum. She was been awarded the AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum of Arts, the Columbia University Visual Arts Department Fellowship, and the Andrew Fisher Fellowship, among others. Working in large-scale installation, performance, and video, A young Yu explores the experience of the Korean diaspora. She uses Korean folk traditions and spiritual practices of pre-Buddhist shamanic religions as inspiration. But rather than regurgitate these rituals, she is interested in how they can be feminized, queered and made her own. A young Yu’s immersive and intoxicating installations are filled with food ingredients, used in shamanic rituals, in varying stages of decay, along with cultural signifiers such as Korean silks. They function as incubators, or wombs, and an environment for the performances rooted in older rituals that have been re-imagined and personalized. Her work is at once personal and specific, addressing her own life and ancestry; but it also transcends to address the universal theme of the need of all humans for ritual.
CHANG-JIN LEE is the Silver winner. She was born in Seoul, Korea. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and she has won Grants and Awards from the NYFA, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Asia Cultural Council, among many others. She has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Tenri Cultural Center in New York, Brandeis University in Boston, and The Buk Seoul Museum of Art. Chang-Jin Lee’s multimedia practice investigates diverse cultural and social issues. In her project “Comfort Women Wanted,’’ she uses public art and video installations to shed light on the 200,000 women, mostly Korean and Chinese, used as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Powerful and disturbing, this work enters one’s psyche and stays. More spiritual is her project “Floating Echo.” Consisting of a transparent inflatable Buddha sitting on a lotus flower and floating in the East River, it subtly evokes intangibility and infinity. Her work ranges from the political to the spiritual, each project delving deeply into its subject.
CHEON PYO LEE, the Bronze winner, has a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Yale University. Having exhibited extensively, including at the Seoul Museum of Art and the Queens Museum, he has also won numerous awards such as the Artist Grant from the Seoul Foundation for Art, and the Yale School of the Art Grant. In his installations and videos Cheon pyo Lee tackles a variety of themes, stylistically marked with absurdity, play, and experimentation. He has a desire to subvert notions of value and authenticity through personal encounters and experiences. Installations such as “so much freedom” are visually stunning, conceptually provocative, and really fun. In the video “Rhinemaiden: A shortness of breath and a taste of ash” there are two women repeatedly spitting at each other, but protected with clear plastic masks. It is a simple gesture, at once unsettling and humorous.
Marshall Price, Ph.D. Senior Curator, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Ayoung Yu In performances, videos and installations Ayoung Yu explores aspects of her Korean heritage, often through elaborate and fantastical settings and with a suggestive narrative that borders on the surreal. These works are ritualistic in nature and have an iconography filled with signs and symbols of loss, decay, regeneration, transformation, transgression, and cultural hybridity. Yu’s aesthetically captivating imagery simultaneously suggests an ancient past and a distant future, existing in an indeterminate temporal space. Ultimately, her works explore ideas of cultural heritage, the transmission and evolution of cultural practices, and, how ritual might function when freed from its original context.
Chang-Jin Lee Through her multi-media installations, Chang-Jin Lee mines the depths of specific cultural and social issues. By combining images, text, and documentary video in works such as “Comfort Women Wanted,” Lee examines a painful and tragic past through interviews with one former Japanese soldier and several Korean, Chinese, Dutch, Indonesian and Filipino survivors of the sexual slavery imposed upon women by the Japanese during World War II. In doing so, Lee’s work strives to bring previously unheard voices forward in a poetic, poignant and ultimately humanizing way.
Cheon Pyo Lee In his sculptural installation composed of found objects and video performances, Cheon Pyo Lee explores large philosophical ideas such as anti-institutionalism, aspects of capitalism in a post-industrial society, and the alienation and existential angst that often accompanies a migratory experience. Lee’s work serves as a critique of these dilemmas, sometimes in whimsical or humorous ways, incorporating actions or objects that would otherwise seem banal. Through an often wry manipulation or assembly of actions or objects, sometimes in the form of a Rube-Goldberg-like installation, Lee creates scenarios in which the viewer is invited to reflect upon the larger implications found therein.
Stephanie Jeanjean, Ph.D. Adjunct Assistant Professor, Cooper Union and Sotheby’s Institute of Art
A young Yu is a promising emerging artist. Her work develops as installations and immersive environments that often evolve from performances and results in video recordings. She creates her own personal intimate spaces that she calls A New Sacred Space (also the titles of her pieces), which are inspired by pre-Buddhist shamanic rituals. While performing, she manipulates pigments, fabrics, garments, organic materials, plants, dirt, food, herbs, spices, and artificial pearls, which she uses as transitional objects and gestures that allow her to heal her feelings of cultural and social ailments. In her own words, she speaks about her work in the context of the Korean diaspora and as “strategies aimed at resolving feelings of displacement and exclusion.”
Chang-Jin Lee is an experienced artist who proposes provocative and bold presentations on topics often too taboo, and too traumatic, to be freely discussed socially and publicly. Her project COMFORT WOMEN WANTED, started in 2013, is an extensive and impressive body of works (so far already exhibited in China, Taiwan, Germany, and throughout the United States). For this project, she has developed various forms of installations and display modes, including a raw presentation in the form of a docu-reality video work that involves some of the protagonists sharing songs and hidden memories of their experiences as prisoners during World War II. Also developing on similar themes, are subtle expressive abstract ink and charcoal drawings.
Cheon Pyo Lee is a mature artist, who mixes language and objects in his work in order to develop large-scale mixed media installations that communicate the situation of the artist as migrant. He composes sculptures using machines and objects of daily use that have been modified, often disassembled, and reconstructed, to be associated in installations with enigmatic open-ended titles, such as in Everything we know (2015). At the intersection of transient moments, one can experience his Chinese Waterfall (2012), a work assembled from a wooden structure on which a money counter, conveyor belt, and dollar bills are displayed; this results in a work that challenges traditional conception of how language communicates meaning.
