/Flying across the Moonlight : Jade Sujin LEE

Flying across the Moonlight 달빛을 가로지르는 여정
installation
2015

*Exhibition History:
2015 أنا [ana] : Please keep your eyes closed for a moment at Maraya Art Centre(Sharjah, United Arab Emirates)
2015 Sikka 15 at Al Bastakia(Dubai, United Arab Emirates)

*The List of Works:
Flying across the Moonlight_ fishing basket, thread, spice, electric bulb, wire, mixed media_ 2015

I made these installation works to track and reflect the memories of physical, psychological and cultural exchanges between Korea and the Islamic world. I studied the cultural exchanges between the Arab world and Korea that flourished between 57 B.C. – 890 A.D., especially in astronomy, technology, literature and art.1 This is a significant historic fact that sheds light on how mutual influences had taken place much prior to the labour exchanges between the Arab world, for example, Saudi Arabia, and Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, and this is also a key direction for my work.

I find the beliefs and spirituality in Islam and its history intriguing. My intention is to actively reflect the aesthetic patterns and symbols of the Islamic world in my installations, particularly the cityscape; that is mosques, domed architecture, and arabesque pattern. As an artist from Korea who intends to make ‘new forms of exchange’ I attempt to apply my interpretation of urban references to my installation works.

This project uncovers the life energy of the real labour of the workers that sustain the economy that underpins society here, and proposes a conceptual landscape using spices and a traditional fishing net. The fishing net used for this work has no edges, re-created based on a philosophical reasoning of the Klein Bottle'2 with no internal and external extinction. This doesn't distinguish subjects from one another, or the East from the West. It avoids dichotomous perspectives for reasoning, being described as a domain to portray an integrated world. Moreover, the repeated geometrical shapes imply a mental state of the real world seeking for an ideal world. Spices are an olfactory element to depict an obscure landscape generated by the olfactory sense. This is an amalgam of comprehensive,
overlapped and unclear forms. The desert covers a rapidly changing and fluctuating reality, while the patterns of obscure shapes, inscribed like fossils on the surface, imply a story created by accumulated time. The two works conjure up the world of stars and the moon where the beliefs of the Islamic world are reflected. Stars are a compass to guide toward a certain point in a realistic landscape, while implying another world or history that remains implicit.

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1 Such influences in Korea generated ‘hyangga’. the Korean vernacular poetry of the Goryeo dynasty,
novels and tales and other historical references, from which mutual exchanges on the spiritual/emotional were carried on, and my study is based on the interesting facts I discovered on these exchanges.

2 In mathematics, the Klein bottle is an example of a non-orientable surface; it is a two-dimensional manifold against which a system for determining a normal vector cannot be consistently defined. Informally, it is a one-sided surface which, if traveled upon, could be followed back to the point of origin while flipping the traveler upside down.

Flying across the Moonlight installation view, Sikka 15, Al Bastakia, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2015 <em>Flying across the Moonlight</em>

Flying across the Moonlight installation view, Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 2015