UNION (Teesdale Street) is pleased to announce the solo exhibition A Family in Disguise by Yu Jinyoung.
Yu Jinyoung’s work focuses on the family, developing from her previous works that reflect on the trapped human beings in society. She tries to reveal the fact that family tend to avoid discord and refuse to expose their true nature to others, instead projecting an image of happiness at all times. She seeks to look into the depth of the relationships within the family unit through its daily life within the claustrophobic domestic space.
The theme of Yu’s works lets us ruminate that the harmonious appearance of family to their guest attending a festive day or a household event could be a disguise. It is from these domestic social events that children gradually learn to suppress their feelings in order that they uphold this harmonious facade.
The disguise of the happy family may be uncovered from the faces of the family members. Their faces are withholding their crying; hiding emotion with cold expression, or disguising as absence of feeling. In addition to this, the gorgeous floral patterns in Yu Jinyoung’s work, used for the wallpaper and attire is a tool of disguise rather than simply decorative. It produces a superficially bright atmosphere designed to lead attention away from the absent or depressed expressions of the family members to beautiful flowers.
Yu Jinyoung was born in 1977 in Korea and currently lives and works in Seoul. Jinyoung graduated in 2005 from MFA Sculpture, Sungshin Women University. She has currently exhibited in Seoul and Osaka.