Solar Grounds: Yi Yunyi

From November 4th to 30th, 2025, gallerychosun will host Yi Yunyi’s solo exhibition <Solar Grounds>. The exhibition features a series of installations and video works that explore familiar imagery and symbols associated with faith. Through these pieces, the artist explores the potential for an art space to function as a venue for spiritual reflection and exchange. 

Rather than serving as substitutes for religious belief, the works in the gallery function as sensory expressions of artistic exploration. Among them are three acrylic panels titled <Chromatic Personae>, inspired by the motifs of stained glass. Traditionally used vertically in architecture to allow light from above, these stained glasses have been reoriented from this context. Mixing elements like mud from Shinan, sea salt, and traces of tidal flats into the surface, the windows no longer open to the sky. Instead, they appear to absorb the colors of the earth, the salt in the air, and the particles of the sea, suggesting a shift of the sacred, from the sky to the ground. 

The exhibition takes place in the basement of gallerychosun, located in a vibrant neighborhood with steady foot traffic. Visitors descend into the space, and on their way back out, are greeted by the intense sunlight illuminating their way out. 

Much like how Gerhard Richter reimagined the stained glass windows of Cologne Cathedral, substituting traditional imagery with randomly arranged colors to evoke a sense of the transcendent, this exhibition uses stained glass to replace doctrinal motifs with the tractile presence of material. 

Richter once stated that “art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God”. Yi Yunyi’s work reflects a similar philosophy: seeking transcendence not through the intangible or divine, but through sensory and material experience. <Solar Ground> invites us to envision a space where light and soil, sky and earth, relationships and exchanges touch and mix each other's boundaries. 

1.

Could we discuss the sea, the sun, and salt? Occasionally, moments of hesitation arise as one wonders how much studying, knowing, lingering with and caring for something is required before one earns the right to speak of it.

Nonetheless, art is perhaps one of the few spaces where personal language can take form, where different beings can momentarily find a sense of safety or relief. Within this space, works can be shared.

This is a space where beauty, ethics, freedom, and equity can be reawakened. It encourages us to consider whether, as Georg Simmel wrote in his reflections on Mental Life(Geistesleben), art might offer a kind of devotion that does not require an external object of faith. It invites a respectful approach to experiencing the world, where meaning emerges through each individual’s engagement with life.

<Solar Grounds>, Yi Yunyi’s solo exhibition, brings together installations and video works that evoke familiar forms of faith or scenes of devotion. Through the exhibition, the artist questions: Can an art space become a site of spiritual exchange?

Yi’s works do not serve as substitutes for belief but take shape as sensory expressions that inhabit the space. At the centre of the exhibition are three acrylic panels titled <Chromatic Personae>, inspired by the motifs of stained glass. Traditionally used vertically in architecture to allow light from above, these stained glasses have been reoriented from this context.

Incorporating elements like mud from Shinan, sea salt, and traces of tidal flats, the windows no longer open toward the sky. Instead, they appear to absorb the colors of the earth, the salt in the air, and the particles of the sea, suggesting a quiet reversal. Maybe sacredness no longer descends from above but rises from the ground.

The exhibition takes place in the basement of gallerychosun, located in a vibrant neighborhood with steady foot traffic. Visitors descend into the space, and on their way back out, are greeted by the intense sunlight illuminating their way out.

Much like how Gerhard Richter reimagined the stained glass windows of Cologne Cathedral, substituting traditional imagery with randomly arranged colors to evoke a sense of the transcendent, this exhibition uses stained glass to replace doctrinal motifs with the tractile presence of material.

Richter once stated that “art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God”. Yi Yunyi’s work reflects a similar philosophy: seeking transcendence not through the intangible or divine, but through sensory and material experience. <Solar Ground> invites us to envision a space where light and soil, sky and earth, relationships and exchanges touch and mix each other's boundaries.

2.

I’ve always enjoyed hearing stories from those who have been far away. There’s something, almost like a genre in listening to someone recount their experiences. Art residency programs make this kind of storytelling possible. They allow artists to stay in a place for a while to observe people and landscapes, and to record conversations and movements. This perspective differs from that of a tourist; it reflects the mindset of someone who stays. A way of seeing shaped by presence. Yi Yunyi’s work emerges from such residencies. A period of stay shaped by the condition of eventual departure. 

When an artist remains in a location with a camera, what’s being recorded is the texture of material, time, and relationships. In an unfinished journey that oscillates between proximity and distance, often crossing borders, only fleeting traces; gestures, expressions, and fragments of language, are preserved. Viewing Yi’s work, I have come to understand this kind of exchange; the activities that occur between staying and leaving as a distinct genre or form of expression. To ‘stay’ in a place cannot simply be reduced to an exchange of value or institutional outcome. A location is not merely the backdrop for experience, but the very point where relationships take shape. 

Yi Yunyi has long been interested in ecology, the natural environment, and the individuals who engage with these surroundings. She frequently explores diverse landscapes and communities, engaging with local people, and stepping in front of the camera herself. 

As seen in <Two Anchors>, she occasionally creates and wears objects, bringing them into public spaces. These actions go beyond mere observation and serve as approaches to establishing connections. In her work, artistic documentation becomes a method of staying, and engagement within a specific environment. 

The conversations she’s shared with friends, the journeys they’ve walked together, and the emotions exchanged along the way serve as both inspiration and foundation for her work. In recent years, her visits to Jeju, Shinan, and Haenam have formed a long, ongoing journey. Particularly, her repeated visit to Shinan, where salt is produced through the natural processes of sunlight and wind, play a central role in her work.  

<Who Stands Beside> is a video work that integrates elements of nature, environment, landscape, performance, and labor. It features visuals of the salt fields in Jeungdo, Shinan, as well as imagery of fishing nets, churches, summer Bible schools, performances, and workshops. 

Yet, Yi’s approach to filming and editing consciously avoids shaping these fragments into a single, linear narrative. Observational moments blend with interactive scenes, and at times, seemingly unrelated episodes are inserted. The technique departs from traditional standards of factual coherence commonly discussed in documentary practice. Instead, it reflects the ambiguity and discontinuity inherent in lived experience. The artist remains immersed in her subjects, while also maintaining a certain distance, a tension that gives her work its quiet, reflective tone. 

3.

Having been closely involved in the making of this exhibition, I was reminded once again that Yi’s artistic practice begins with encounters. Prior to creating any work, she places just as much emphasis on conversation as on research and investigation. What recurs through her work, whether in the pieces themselves or in traces left by installations, are moments of dialogue, friendship, and spontaneous exchange. These elements emerge through acts of communication and engagement in particular contexts, becoming marked, remembered, and shared. Watching these moments unfold, I reflected on the communities that form around art, those made of open-ended, purposeless connections.

Throughout the process of working together, our conversations often circled back to the question: “What is it that we’re doing here, together?”

While at times this question seemed to drift without clear direction, it ultimately revealed the heart of the process. A process in which what remains is not a goal or achievement, but the relationships formed along the way. A process where words and actions, hesitation and uncertainty, are all part of what is recorded.

In Yi’s work, moments arise where a loose, informal sense of community quietly takes shape and is gently documented. Scenes in her video works; people praying, singing, walking across salt fields, gathering by the sea, serve as performances of forming connections.

These acts become gestures that stand in for doctrine or reflect each body expressing its own way of being. Importantly, these performances and their documentation do not exclude anyone, nor any moment. Yi’s work acknowledges those present nearby. This, too, is a kind of ritual; a form of community that art can offer. Once a viewer engages with the work, they too become a participant.

On the other hand, can the comfort that art offers be considered a form of salvation? A salvation without destination or doctrine, one that subtly unfolds through moments of listening, pausing, and looking together. Such comfort, in truth, arrives as a thoroughly subjective fact. Could the essential element of salvation, traditionally bound to systems of belief, be reinterpreted within the realm of personal experience? Before discussing salvation, or even while doing so, art engages with reality, forms an ethics of relation, and practices ways of responding to the world.

“Instead of a standard curational statement, this exhibition begins with an essay that introduces the exhibition; an invitation to one way of looking”.

Written by Parade & Patchwork