Jinny Yu

The nomadic palimpsests of Jinny Yu’s new paintings sink readily into a viewer’s consciousness, and with much sumptuous resonance. The works’ sense of seamless embedding is second only to their liveliness and beguiling, aesthetic grace.

No formalist, Yu. She wants painting to transgress those orthodoxies and move into the lived space of the viewer. Her marks are like transit corridors, escalators and ramps that carry us into painting’s myriad microstructures, and then deliver us outside. This work pays homage to the idea of the nomadic, even as it enacts what “nomadic” means. Endlessly mutable, like identity itself, the marks in her paintings obey no boundary markers as they cross multiple borders. Each work is constructed from sheets of aluminum in six-by-six-foot squares. Between the patterned under-layer, and an anamorphic, prismatic overlay, sense is slowly accreted to the palimpsest as a whole.

Her paintings, it seems to me, are fully interpretable as rhizomatic maps. I mean “rhizome” in the sense that French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed that concept. (The concept of the rhizome was notably appropriated by the Internet community and became the principal metaphor for the infrastructure of the World Wide Web.)

Yu’s paintings are consummately restless things. They are a-centred and wholly detachable when understood as three-dimensional maps, animated by a restless circulation of interior linear states that captivate the gaze. The signs in these paintings never stop signifying. They are forever on the prowl, subsisting stasis and taxonomy.

Perhaps Yu’s closest kindred spirit in painting these days (at least in Canada) is David Blatherwick, a fellow traveller who treats painting like the Deleuizian/ Guattarian construct that it can be. He is as passionate at making painting nomadic, rhizomatic, life changing, as she is.

In her work, Yu fruitfully employs very different regimes of signs that act together like industrious worker ants or bees to make her honeycombed pathways trackable at all levels, and everywhere. The overall grid is animated by the optic as it searches beneath and above her linear crops of marks; the fractal array of linear multiplicities makes these rhizomes on the loose unstoppable epiphanies in their own right. You are drawn to think of Yu’s markings as constituting semiotic chains or networks of nerve fibers in a state of volumetric amplification.

What Yu is trying to do, I think, is to anthropomorphize painting. Unlike her confrere Blatherwick with his viral painting licks, and his taste for colonization, she wants to proliferate inside geometry in order to breach formalist boundaries, and, through over-determination, reach an exorbitant Outside. Still, as a contemporary abstract painter, Yu shares with Blatherwick a tenacious, utopian desire for a truly global consciousness.

The continuing instability of Yu’s paintings, these nomadic abstractions, and the efflorescence of her paint space, keep them moving light years beyond the Modernist home planet. Her segmentary lines explode into energized lines of flight. She de-territorializes and reterritorializes the space of painting at one and the same time. As a result, the viewing subject is perennially decentred. The paintings never settle into lazy-eyed stasis. They keep the optic hopping. They keep us on our toes.

Her abstracts are lovely maps, lush cartographies. On Facebook, and true to her painting, she issues status reports from metropolitan Seoul one day, New York the next and then Ottawa (where she teaches) the day after. A nomad herself of no marginal persuasion, her work antes up with its own myriad entry and exit visas. ■

“Story of a Global Nomad: Jinny Yu” was exhibited at Galerie Art Mûr in Montreal from February 21 to March 22, 2008.

James D. Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal. His recent publications include Cheese, Worms and the Holes in Everything: David Blathwerick (Art Gallery of Windsor, 2008), A Mind of Winter: The Art and Thought of John Heward (Musée du Quebec, Quebec City, 2008) and On the Inside: Janet Werner (Parisian Laundry, Montreal, 2008).