■ THE WORK OF THE Korean artist Yoon Ji Seon is impossible to pigeonhole. Both she and her work are remarkable. Firstly, there are her Rag Faces – puffed-up, padded visages that contor t and gurn, while appearing to be stretched and pulled beyond recognition by invisible hands that yank at the threads that ooze from them.Then there is the Pricked series – again featuring faces but these are elegiac, veiled with lace and pierced hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times with tiny acupuncture needles.The photographs in her Body series are even more unsettling, with female hands caught between overly-hirsute, seemingly male, thighs and aping genitalia.
Although she trained as a painter,Yoon describes herself as having a ‘love-hate’ relationship with painting. An iconoclast, making work that eschews the traditional, she talks about her chosen oeuvre as ‘causing a rift between me and my teacher’.
Turning the ostracisation to her advantage,Yoon decided to go her own way.‘The fact that no one was paying attention to me gave me freedom. I could do anything,’ she remarks. And she did, making work with found organic objects like animal bones, dried chicken feet and horned skulls, all of which she embedded with her hair or adorned with ostrich feathers and jewels.