Sine Cera: Sangyoon Yoon
Gallery Chosun will hold a solo exhibition by artist Sangyoon Yoon from May 25 to June 13, 2018. Yoon creates realistic oil paintings with his right hand and spontaneous drawings with his left. The exhibition is titled 《Sine Cera》, which means “without wax” in Latin.
In ancient Rome, some potters covered cracks in their clay with wax to hide imperfections. Honest potters who did not use wax marked their work with “Sine Cera” to show it was genuine. Today, the phrase is the root of the word sincerely and means “true” or “unadorned”. True to this idea, Yoon aims to share the authentic and skillful world of his work in this exhibition.
Yoon’s right-hand paintings are built in three layers: water, figures, and structures above them. Each painting contains three coexisting worlds. The bottom layer, water, represents the Id; the world of the subconscious, the submerged parts represent the ego, and the structures above represent the superego. These follow Freud’s model of the mind, showing the daily tension and balance between conscious and unconscious forces.
Sangyoon Yoon’s left-hand drawings reveal the unique nature of physical practice. They connect to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the body as a subject engaged with the world. Compared to the relatively realistic right-hand paintings, the left-hand drawings are spontaneous and abstract. The faces of the figures are distorted or simplified, sometimes unrecognizable, echoing Merleau-Ponty’s concept of la chair (flesh).
Merleau-Ponty argued that the body and the material world are made of the same “flesh” so they cannot be truly separated. In Yoon’s drawings, the figures cannot be identified as individuals, and they do not exist as isolated entities. This can be seen as an attempt to integrate the figures into the world itself rather than portraying them as distinct people. Viewers, in turn, encounter the drawings as part of that same material world, physically engaging with the work.
As Merleau-Ponty mentioned, the seer and the seen are reversed, and it becomes impossible to tell who is seeing and who is being seen. In this way, the viewer and the drawing simultaneously see and are seen. Through bodily perception, we can glimpse the invisible or mental world behind what is visible, and Yoon’s left-hand drawings offer a window into this hidden mental dimension.
The Latin sine means “without”, and cera refers to wax. In context, cera can also mean a wax-cast portrait and, by extension, a face. So sine cera can mean both “without wax” (sincere, true) and “faceless”. In Yoon’s left-hand drawings, the figures are faceless. They resist being reduced to a visually recognizable reality and instead invite perception through senses beyond sight.
If Yoon’s right-hand paintings reveal concrete faces within a Freudian model, allowing the identification of individuals, his left-hand drawings open a world of invisibility that cannot be explained or contained by any system. Viewing both together is like confronting the Freudian world and Merleau-Ponty’s flesh simultaneously. By exploring the visible reality and its hidden layers through two different approaches, Yoon occupies a unique position in contemporary art.