TEFAF New York 2025

Yeesookyung: Stand 319

Her most acclaimed series Translated Vase originated from her fascination with fragments, which began after visiting a Korean pottery master in 2001. These masters, obsessed with achieving perfection, would routinely destroy any pieces that exhibited even the slightest flaws. Yeesookyung’s research focuses on these broken and discarded fragments, interpreting them as expressions of stress released from the vulnerability of completeness.

She actively intervenes in this state, combining different fragments into intricate structures and sealing the cracks with gold. These works, resembling puzzles, gain entirely new narratives. In Korean, the words for ‘gold,’ ‘flaw,’ and ‘crack’ all share the same pronunciation—geum. As a result, the fragments, connected and layered with geum, ultimately take on an organic form that cannot be predetermined.

Her Translated Vase series is currently feartured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the major exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie . 

Her Oh, Rose! series (2022–ongoing) serves as a continuation of her Past Life Regression Painting series (2014–ongoing). This body of work emerged from the artist’s experiences undergoing past life regression under hypnosis, guided by a professional hypnotherapist, in search of new painting subjects. In this series, the rose becomes a central motif, enabling Yeesookyung to transcend the constraints of space and time and access the unconscious realm, where new narratives unfold. Set against a mysterious abstract backdrop reminiscent of the aurora borealis, the blooming rose hovers at the threshold between past and present lives, the conscious and unconscious, and the abstract and figurative.

Furthermore, Yeesookyung believes that the rose’s auspicious symbolism adds depth to the series. In East Asian cultures, the rose has long been associated with a beautiful, bewitching woman or a flower that blooms throughout all four seasons. The phrase “四季長春” conveys a benevolent wish for perpetual warmth and comfort, much like an eternal spring. Like Translated Vase, which finds meaning in the artistic reinterpretation of cracked and discarded ceramics, this series evokes themes of psychological recovery and rebirth. “To me, roses mean ‘light’ and ‘life,’ and I hope that the energy created by these tiny lives blooming in the light of the aurora borealis can be felt,” says Yeesookyung, who envisions the series as a space of healing infused with the vitality of roses.

Yeesookyung’s “Moonlight Crown” series is structured in such a way that they expand upward from the crown shape at the very bottom. Inspired by a Silla gold crown and Baekje gilt-bronze incense burner, Yee uses the crown—a symbol of power—as a support rather than placing it atop a head, drawing an artwork that is both spiritual object and body. The symbolic forms emerge as a mixture of craft materials such as iron, glass, and pearl come together like mosaics of fragments, which also seem to melt as if dissolved in flames.

The fragment-based composition bears associations with the ceramic sculptures that served as the principal material from the artist’s previous Translated Vase (2002~) series. Just as those shattered pieces clustered together to form new shapes and lives, the Moonlight Crowns create new “life forms” by bringing together fragmented materials and symbols diverging from their contexts in terms of existing beliefs. It is an approach that entails an intricate crafting process. A repeated day-to-day sequence of the process elicited an approach from the artist that bordered on the unconscious and reflective, as though her hands themselves were thinking and creating automatically. Combining contemplation with labor, it is a process that the artist herself has referred to as “automatic writing” – a state of hypnotic concentration, as if reciting a written prayer.

Yeesookyung produced her Moonlight Crowns around the year 2020, a time when a tiny crown-shaped virus was just beginning to rampage around the world. It is as though she was sweeping up the scraps of religion, mythology, and belief dangling from the edges of fragmented objects and melting them with the fire of her fingertips. The series appears likely to continue for the foreseeable future; the artist has expressed her “hope that the work reaches the realm of artistic sacred items.” Recalling the comfort that it gave her to concentrate so deeply on the making of her artwork, she anticipates that it might transcend situations of death, fear, and frustration to convey the sense that “our bodies are sacred temples, our spirits resplendent crowns.” As we look upon the Moonlight Crowns, the exhibition invites us to focus on a sacredness within each of us that is not reducible to any one religion. As we look into the mirror faces of the Moonlight Crowns, it is an opportunity for us to focus on the divine within ourselves.