Rina Yoon

Extreme heat, high wind, years of drought. From California coast to the southwest, the country is on fire. In the past ten years, hundreds of thousands of acres have burnt and are burning. In June 2020, I spent a month in Tucson, Arizona during the Bighorn fire, which devoured 120,000 acres of Santa Catalina Mountains. Ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice, we watched the mountain glowing red at night, nervously waiting for the monsoon season to start. It’s one thing to read about a catastrophic wildfire in Apple’s newsfeed. It’s another thing to witness one in close proximity. Two years later, I visited one of the burn sites. Life continues even where the fire had blazed through not too long ago. You can see new growth, shrubs and wild flowers blooming in stark contrast to charred and blackened mesquite and pine trees. In many cases, the heat of the blaze produced a gallery of grotesque forms: twisted trunks and warped branches and detached outer barks. Charred, naked, hollowed, the trees remain standing, as if they are there to tell us what they witnessed, hanging onto the memory.

I gathered some of the remains, brought them to the house, and began cleaning off the soot and ashes. To me this act of tending was more like a conversation I had with the trees that may not have survived the fire but still had a story to tell. As I cleaned and added hand-coiled paper, I felt connected to the beauty, horror, and resilience of nature. The aftereffects of wildfires are rarely part of their story, which ordinarily focuses on the spectacular blazes that ravage large tracks of parched wilderness. Windblown flames, record heat, Hotshot crews—these are the storylines. What is there to say about burn scars themselves? Whether forests will be resilient to things like wildfires and climate change is a huge question. A lot depends on the recovery time of areas damaged by severe burns, which can be long. A piece of forest with moderate harm might show robust signs of recovery a decade from now. A really bad burn area might not recover for 100 years. As I conceive it here, the process of healing begins now with a conversation with the remains of fire.

The Mesquite is one of the most common trees of the desert southwest. It’s remarkably drought tolerant and sends its roots deep in the ground to find water when in need. When water is scarce, it will drop its leaves to conserve energy, proving itself an exceptional survivor of the harsh desert. Many in the Southwest have depended on mesquites for shade, fuel, lumber, and nutrition for thousands of years. For this reason, it has been dubbed “The Tree of Life.” An Apache myth recounts how the sun and moon together formed the mesquite tree and then dangled beans from its branches.

There are certain words that, like mesquite, resonate with meaning for me. Mulgil, a Korean word for waterway, has always stood out in my mind as a distinctive feature of our landscape. As the water finds its way through the terrain of the earth, the earth will also move and shift, give way for the water to flow. As Heraclitus said, everything flows, nothing stands still.

My recent work explores the interconnectedness of the natural world to ourselves. Each work in the exhibit examines how the forms and shapes of nature correspond to our interior landscape, and offers a moment of contemplation on nature and time. As for techniques, I incorporate hand-coiled paper, a practice called jiseung, mirroring its forms and shapes. Hand-coiling hanji, Korean traditional mulberry paper, is a slow process, but the technique, like raising the grain of the mesquite tree disks and hand printing, requires an attentiveness that foregrounds the immediate world around me. As I lay down the paper coils, also from nature, onto the paper, I am imagining the life of a tree, a flow of the water, their stories.

Homologies

Rina Yoon and John Schuerman

Homology is a term from biology and means the state of having similar structure or form between parts, especially across species that reflect a common ancestry. For example, the wing of a bat, the foreleg of a mouse, and the forearm of a human are homologous .

In this project we honor the simple beauty of sticks. We work slowly -contemplating, meditating, drawing, wrapping, and framing each unique yet related expression from trees across distant territories. We see the similarity of forms from stick to stick, and we create our own homologies. Each stick is replicated (drawing) then it is wrapped in paper coils, and the pair are presented together. The form repeats yet the unique code of each stick is captured in the drawing and in the coiled paper wrapping. Multiple pairs (drawing/wrapped stick) are presented at once to enable consideration of common ancestry. In human timescales our work nearly halts the decay of this natural detritus. Their bodies are manicured and wrapped, preserved for their next life.

The sticks come from two locations –lush Minnesota and arid Arizona. The Minnesota sticks came from the shore of the Mississippi river, their origin somewhere upstream, their identities largely worn away. The Arizona sticks are equally anonymous, weathered by the desert. In this anonymity they represent all sticks, past and present.

In the summer of 2019, I went to the Klode Park in Whitefish Bay where I saw piles of driftwood scattered along the beach. Somewhere, I imagined, a tree had gone to pieces, maybe a red oak from erosion or a hemlock from violent storms, swept into the lake. With 1,600 miles of shoreline, Lake Michigan swallows many trees. They float alligator-like for years until wind and tide roll them ashore. My driftwood floated, bobbed, and found its final resting place on the Milwaukee shore. By then, the tree had been smashed and stripped naked of bark after a life of sea-tossed wandering. Stark and desolate now, some pieces covered by sand and debris, they lay broken and bent but stunning in their pure twisted form.

I was Intrigued by their odd shapes and by the affiliation between tree and water. So I brought a bundle back to the studio. Holding it one at a time in my hands, examining its surface, noticing the hollow holes and the scars that the water made, and the bent shapes that looked like broken limbs, I felt connected to the history of wood, to the life of an unknown tree that once flourished in the soil somewhere in full being, but now prone and weathered and in pieces. One by one, I examined and cleaned them, as if preparing each piece for a funeral. I began to wrap them with handmade paper coils as a gesture of putting their skin back on. Paper I use comes from the branches of mulberry trees, so it felt as though I was returning the fragment back to its rightful owner. In Korea, between the 16th and the 19th century, people made paper garments to clothe the dead. According to Jeon Yangbae, a well-known Korean paper garment designer, paper is the ideal material for either cremation or burial due to its combustibility and biodegradability.

As I paper-wrapped the driftwood in my studio, it seemed as if these fragments were revealing their life stories, their journey in this life. This installation is my effort to honor the trees they once were.

Tracing Time: Mississippi Meander Belt

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop...is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.

- From Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991 Gretel Ehrlich

Tracing Time is inspired by Harold Fisk’s Mississippi River Maps (1944), a study conducted for US Army Corps of Engineers to better understand the natural movements of the river. Traveling over 2000 miles, and based on gathering geologic and historic evidences, Fisk recorded ancient meanderings of the river over thousands of years. Visually intriguing as an image, the map signifies the complexity of the earth’s movements over vast millennia and so reveals the markings of time.

My river map is fashioned out of paper coils, a practice derived from a traditional Korean paper technique called jiseung (paper coiling) which requires intense labor, time, and hand strength. It is a very slow and meticulous process ordinarily applied to the making of utilitarian objects like baskets, basins, and tea wares. As I came to see it, the labor of hand-coiling paper was inseparable from the beauty and diligence of the original river maps, which depended on Fisk’s exacting and painstaking efforts to determine the history of the Mississippi River. As I followed Fisk’s journey down the Mississippi, I was matching not only his lines and shapes—his ghost trails—but the incalculable handiwork that took him deep into the river’s alluvial valley.

 “Water is precious and sacred…it is one of the basic elements needed for all life to exist.”

http://www.motherearthwaterwalk.com/

Anishinawbe grandmother, Josephine Mandamin who has walked around the Great Lakes, has said “As women, we are carriers of the water.  We carry life for the people.  So when we carry that water, we are telling people that we will go any lengths for the water.”

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/03/04/ojibwe-grandmother-and-water-walker-josephine-mandamin-honored-conservation-163643

Water symbolizes continuity of life and on-going flow of time.

Earth shifts and makes room for water to make its way, from tiny creeks to streams, to rivers and to seas, and above and below.

Water flows into every crevices of the earth, seeps deep beneath. Like earth, water brings life into our body.

My beloved friend once told me “we are the water”.  This body of work is my way of honoring and welcoming the wisdom of water.

In Bodies of Water series, I continue to address the interconnectedness of nature and the human body. The water that flows through the earth runs through our bodies. I think about tiny creeks to raging rivers and seas, above and below the earth, flowing into every crevice and seeping deep below the earth. As the water finds its way through the terrain of the earth, the earth will also move and shift. This constant shaping and reshaping happen in our bodies and minds. Imagining I have the rivers that flow through my body connects me closer to nature.

In “Between In and Yeon” I have been examining the concept of “Inyeon (因緣)”, which is one of the most fundamental concepts in Buddhism.  In means “cause” and Yeon means “effect”.  It refers to the view that everything in life is interdependent and interconnected.  

A seed is a good example to demonstrate this relationship.  A fate of a seed, which has its pre-determined property (In), is dependent on the external environment - soil condition, climate (Yeon). Much like a seed, our human life is interdependent -your own DNA, familial situation, geographical environment, life situations influence and shape our sense of being.  We undergo the continuous change throughout our lifetime, both physically and emotionally; our sense of self is being shaped and re-shaped as we negotiate between fate and will, and push and pull.

In “Between In and Yeon”, the body returns to the earth and emerges from it.  The earth and body are separate and one at the same time.   I imagine that my body, like a seed has been planted in the soil of life.  The body waits quietly underneath the soil till it emerges from the surface.  It will grow and endure, celebrate and struggle, until it returns back to the earth. 

Hand-coiled paper (jiseung) is a traditional Korean technique that I learned several years ago during my trip to Korea. In this installation work, I immersed myself in the time consuming and meditative aspects of cutting thin strips of paper, coiling one at a time, and gluing one coil next to another to build the sinuous terrain.  The work is a result of one year and 50 yards of paper.

The Villa Terrace Decorative Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI   2015

media:  hand-coiled mulberry paper

variable dimension (6 ft x 13 ft)

In the Earthbody series, I address my on-going investigation of the rootedness/ the rootlessness; staying connected and wanting to break away; tension and resolution.  The use of the human figure serves as a container of memories and history of time, continually shaping and re-shaping one’s identity. The plant form suggests growth and change, but it is also inspired by the interior of the body, and its complex intersections of tissue and blood vessels. The images bring about an element of hope, stemming from a sense of a resolve, and invite a moment of reflection.

I used digital photopolymer intaglio process, which is one of the newest technologies in intaglio printmaking, combined with more traditional etching technique for the hand-generated marks.   Altering the photographic image of myself by scraping, cutting and adding, the image “becomes” the witness of the time and action.

I am attracted to the fragility and its resilience of hanji (Korean mulberry paper). During my trip to Korea in 2010, I learned the traditional paper coiling technique, called Jiseung, from a master artisan, Kim Hyemija.  Upon returning, I spent countless hours coiling thin strips of Korean mulberry paper and began constructing human body parts one string at a time.  When the paper is coiled, it becomes strong. I have found myself extremely engaged in this very slow and meticulous coiling process and I am drawn to its meditative and humble experience. The figurative forms that I make with the coils reference what is underneath the skin.  The coiled surface reminds me of the veins of leaves or the rings of a tree trunk.  Through acceptance and sustenance, we form our sense of belongs.

“Sympathetic Fibers”, filled with hundreds of delicate marks, the large-scale prints are suggestive of internal bodily systems. I refer to sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for sustaining a balance of body functions under stress and keeping its vital operations in order.  The prints reflect on family, body, bodily tissues, growth and my connection to nature.

In the installation piece "The Process of Reconciliation", 13 largedouble-sided prints were assembled to create a spiral space that a viewer can walk into.  As one goes through the spiral corridor, the gentle fluttering and swaying of the paper prints serves as a reminder of ones' own fragility.

The title "Mapping the Body" was inspired by the idea of a map as an abstract form used to guide one to find a way.  The "body" undergoing a continuous process of breaking down, evolving, shaping, and reshaping, serves as a bearer of memories and time. I wanted to examine the connection between past and present selves to understand how the past influences shaping of one’s identity, thus facilitate the process of reconciliation.