The metallic geometries of Byun Sook-Kyung investigate the laws and energies of the universe to discover new dimensions.
Investigating nature in order to re-read our ordinary life and to discovernew dimensions. The Korean artist Byun Sook-Kyung uses sculpture to re-write and to translate elements of nature in synthetic and strongly allusive plastic models that analyze in depth the concept of essence, of interior truth and of perception of the absolute. Under her hands the metal becomes a subdued and ductile instrument that assumes unpredictable forms, that are fruit of a personal synthesis of perceptions of the phenomenal datum.
The desire for knowledge and for self-knowledge drive her to find answers in her existence and, in the true nature surrounding us. She has an attentive look on the world, that joined to her curiosity, sensitivity, depth of thought and artistic entrepreneurship, leads her to transform an ordinary object into something extraordinary and stimulating, allowing to embark on a discovery journey inside the heart of things. A simple spider web can constitute the pretext to investigate the unwritten laws of the universe and to identify the energies that regulate equilibriums between all things.
And it is indeed a spider web, seen at dawn, after a sleepless night spent thinking about some of her works, that leads Byun to create geometric structures based on the union of opposites. For the Korean artist, the spider web represents the architecture of nature: a practically perfect structure which, although light and potentially vulnerable to atmospheric agents, becomes vital and always different based on the elements it is weaved on.
The lines of the web, with their concentricity and their creation of optically perfect geometric elements, are reproduced in metallic structures that regulate the rhythm of fruition with their projections and the chromatic contrasts of light and surface, thus altering the rapport between finite and infinite. Hence Byun arrives at works that go beyond the finite and beyond what we usually superficially define as reality.
What looks like an abstract work at first glance, far removed from any figurative reference, turns into a cosmic puzzle right before our eyes, into a mosaic of being where every piece, albeit in tune with others, answers to a specific sensation, where every geometric element seems to exist as a function of the subsequent one.
Byun’s works do not translate nature; rather, they open it up, dig into it,study it, synthesize and emancipate it through emotional and cerebralpassions, through determined and strong signs, through metallic colorsthat cut the form but at the same time create intriguing and mysteriousinter-dimensional openings. Byun has a true passion for art and for life,for matter and for nature: a passion that is open to the emotions, withthe awareness of being just a small portion of the universe but importantto contribute to its existence.
Maurizio Vanni e Michela Cicchinè