YK PRESENTS Back Up My Heart to the Cosmic Machine, a group exhibition featuring the works of Minsuh Kang, Hanwon Jang, and Yujin Chung. The title of the exhibition draws on the visual language of 1980s sci-fi cinema and pop music, re-examining how we construct memory, desire, and aspiration through everyday objects and cultural moments.
Minsuh Kang’s work is promiscuously referential. Here, excerpts of film, news media, and music collide in an arrangement of recombinant forms. Her compositions elaborate fictions and probe the mechanisms through which we aspire to something. In Faye’s beautiful music, Kang weaves together the voice of Faye Wong with the instrumental backing of her idol Teresa Teng, staging an impossible collaboration that relays a desire beyond its original context.
Such referential engagements also appear in the work of Hanwon Jang, whose five sculptures translate everyday objects through the shifting, often dissonant filter of her subconscious. What begins as familiar quickly takes on an uncanny presence, unsettling any sense of scale or recognition. In one work, videocassette tapes are repeatedly cast and then veiled in organza silk, their forms softened and partially obscured. Each iteration carries subtle variations, evoking the fragile, mutable rhythms of memory.
Yujin Chung’s The Nightingale recalls the architectural technique used to construct “security floors” in ancient Japanese palaces. Known in Japanese as uguisu-bari, these so-called “Nightingale floors” were engineered with loose boards and specially placed metal clamps so that they emitted bird-like chirps when stepped on. Originally developed to alert inhabitants to the presence of intruders, uguisu-bari here becomes symptomatic of the mimicry through which Chung explores the shifting power of an object.
