Creative Spotlight: Visual Artist Yujin Son
'Lotus Flower’ by Yujin Son, 2022
Interview by Elena Chen
Yujin Son is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in South Korea and for the past nine years has made New York City her home. She graduated from Parsons School of Design with a BFA and in 2021 earned her MFA from The City College of New York. Through her work with illustration, digital art, 3D and video, she explores various narratives on spirituality such as Buddhism, science and the philosophy behind AI and perception.
Yujin grew up mostly in Shanghai, China and this is where her own spirituality is rooted from along with a curiosity for what goes on beyond the language barriers and physical limitations that are connected to spirituality and quantum physics. You’ll learn in the interview that much of her work interconnects an imagination and research into science, fantasy and spiritualism.
DNAMAG: I wanted to start off with a question that would introduce others to your work: If you had to use one sentence to summarize your practice, what would it be?
Yujin Son: I like exploring the human mind through AI art and research of ancient religions and spiritual practices, which is expressed in digital media including illustrations, concept art, 3D/VR art and video art.
Seeing as so much of your work is about a digital reality (you work in digital media and with VR/AR), how do you think our digital and analog worlds collide in your art?
As an illustrator, drawing with my hand on paper feels organic and clear when it comes to brainstorming/ sketching out inspirations. It is like a record of my first train of thoughts and reaction to a topic or an inspiration. (Some digital artists will agree that when they sketch on paper, it looks better than the second version drawn on a tablet) When I transfer it to digital medium, it allows me to expand and transform the original idea through manipulating its form in 3D, VR or AI art. Technology has allowed us to see things in 2D/3D to 4D- it is like looking into a prism, that you are seeing one surface but multiple colors coming out, therefore forming a sense of space and structure. The originality of our world is recreated in the digital world (sometimes even mutated, which is interesting) . I like to explore the ever-changing, unexpected sides of the human mind, which I think the digital world opens it up. Concept-wise, I am always interested in the symbiosis of organic and mechanical matters, like H.R Giger’s paintings. (I wonder if the word ‘organic’ is included in ‘analog’) I like to combine human anatomy with cables and metal, like cybernetics.
How do these worlds meet in art in general?
I believe the barrier keeps getting thinner with each passing day, take the MetaVerse and NFTs for example people owning parts of and living in the digital world. Internet art was the start where people made memes and funny videos- like in the early FB or Myspace era, that internet art aesthetic of pixel art, data-moshing, 2D/3D graphics and memes kept going until it formed its own genre. Avatar is one example, which now it’s used in MetaVerse to represent our identities. What’s amazing about the internet art is that people could easily copy and paste, recreate or manipulate the image and allowed collaboration with strangers on the web. I think the digital art world is becoming more adaptive about this organic collaboration method, each ‘artists’ or users becoming nodes of the web.
collaboration work: Super Friend x Yujin Son
How do you think your personal experiences have led you to topics you currently explore in your practice?
I see myself as a third culture person, who was born in Korea but grew up in China and educated in an English speaking school. It gave me a sense of boundarylessness when it comes to countries, language, culture and gender, along with some identity crisis and feeling like ‘I don’t belong anywhere’. At some point it gave me a real dark period of my life. I believe that pain can make us become philosophical. Naturally I developed a deep interest in the human mind in general - ‘what is the purest consciousness that is not limited to the physical body or reality?’ At the same time, the internet was blooming and I started to hang out a lot in the cyberspace, observing and absorbing unlimited and unhidden shows, anime, documents, studies and so on. I drew and drew, that was the way to study myself and escape from reality, then when I started learning about digital art, it became more like a liberation of my ideas and vision.
What would you like people to take away from your work after experiencing it?
I’m currently exploring about a higher state of the human mind, such as how it’s described in Buddhism, or by yogis, and other spiritual practices that emphasize inner peace, a meditative state which ultimately allows us to create our wanted reality through ‘reprogramming’ our brain wave, thought patterns. Concepts they have in common are learning to let go, keeping the inner peace, and mostly importantly, healing oneself. I hope my audience feels comfortable when they enter my art world and feel like they are sharing their experience with me at the same time by feeling and understanding my story of healing.
What would you like to create more of in the future? What topics would you like to explore or continue exploring?
I would like to continue learning more about AI and art, as long as it doesn't require me to code- I will continue to search for programs that I can explore in-depth by putting image and language inputs, see how AI recreates them, and refeed the process to catch any patterns in how AI ‘think’ / process that information. I want to connect elements of the human mind such as dreams to AI and explore human consciousness- I have a theory that AI has its consciousness and it could be similar to how we function inside our head.
See more of Yujin Son’s works at @son_nyx
*Images via YujinSon.com
MARC JACOBS
