On Dysfunctional Obsession:
Passion, fascination, infatuation, craze, and preoccupation are primarily the ways we describe these acts of, occurrences of, the directions of, the perspectives of, that best depicts the state of the captive individual and the incessant modes that are in question. This individual is an enthusiast at the conduct of pursuit, and in the state of reiteration regarding their subjects. They resemble their multi-faceted observations in uniquely personalised ways. The artist wants to bring your attention to; To circumscribe the emphasis of this text onto the methodological relationship in which the enthusiast and their subjects are constantly at tension with; To enquire about the functions and the modes that comprises of our laborious practices, at the same time the mode which is the repetition of questioning, recording, thus collecting that does not necessarily result in an accumulation of bettered artefacts or advanced enquiries or enhanced outcomes.
The next hypothesis then would be that this act of litany that is executed, must demonstrate a direction of progress towards even the vaguest aim, however broad the enquired might be, whatever the nearing results show to be. On the contrary, what if there were no such pivotal movements towards the direction of their obsession despite the duration spent with or in or on it? That the state, the act itself was merely an accumulation, and that her or his satisfaction of state, mode and virtue came perhaps from the variations of accumulation in itself. How must we comprehend this as context, as application, as material, as an extended body of the practitioner or of the researcher? There are no given guidelines; there is no given law concerning the reasons behind this gravitational pull towards gathering items of knowledge, or of our attachments, or of our enquiries. The artist is constantly at the battle of attempting to understanding why it is, and, how it is that one given person may be so intrinsically focused on one given entity, thing or field, and on the contrary, how one might be about countless fields.
This exhibition echoes notions of the artist’s essay, ‘Dysfunctional Obsession’, 2018, referencing a variety of personal encounters that Yoon had attempted to analytically categorize into mathematical equations according to the artist’s indexicalities. Art as an extension of the artist’s hand at the site and the physical labour as an extension of the artist’s body at the mode of production. Works created at the Untitled Space Residency gather Yoon’s various notions regarding enquiries relative to decision making and learning, operating between the lines of production vs. exploitation, order vs. disorder, as well as a luxury vs. pseudo-gratifications. Questioning the modes of enquiring encounters in daily lives as well as the personification of contradicting principles, through ‘Dysfunctional Obsession’, the artist is attempting to create a visual reference point of personal scales of importance and mass through utilizing various modes of physical labour in search for alternative states to maximize connections tied to understanding.