"Making art allows me to make sense of the world and myself."--Shizico Yi 2017 |
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Dr. Shizico Yi, a British artist, is associated with GSY Studio , British Art Network and Close .
She specializes in installations, films, and paintings, with her work often revolving around themes of loss, repetition, the mundane, and the significance of memories to a person. Drawing from her background in design and film, Shizico intertwines her passions to create installation and projects that reflect her personal experiences within the broader context of society and the human condition. Shizico Yi holds a PhD in Fine Art, awarded by UEL in the UK in 2017. She also completed a Master in Fine Art with a BA in Womenswear from UAL, London. As an internationally acclaimed artist, Yi has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions at prominent cultural locations such as London, Korea, and Italy. Her artwork has found its way into collections in various countries, with a substantial number of pieces housed in private collections across the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and the UK. Notably, Shizico Yi secured the title of Winner of the Women Film Makers: Best Shorts Competition in 2013 in Los Angeles, USA. She also serves as a guest jury member at the 14th-16th Annual New York City Independent Film Festival from 2022 to 2024 and is a curator and founder of no barking aRt |
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Shizico Yi practices plein air painting from spring to autumn and engages in studio work during the winter months. Her choice of method and location significantly influences the outcome, energy, and scale of her artworks. She specializes in focusing on a singular concept to bring depth to her approach and layers of technique, while also adhering to self-imposed strict guidelines and colour restrictions to enhance her images. She embraces experimentation with new materials and delves into the depth of concepts and meaning by complementing her visual language with essays and poems alongside her practice.
Yi's work aims to explore artistic obsession through repetitive documentation of the domestic and the everyday. She uses photography, large-scale installations, moving image projections, and two-dimensional visual images (paintings, drawings, and prints) to articulate her relationship to family and memories, and time. |
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Time is the essence of Yi's work. With Yi's unique ways of working through various materials, she wishes to fundamentally understand what time means to humans and memories.
Through working on various materials, Yi creates her unique visual language in film, sculpture, and 2D images applying them to her environmental installation, which tells the stories of the time. For example, in Yi's sculpture, she deals with casting resin and its transformative character when cured, which brings time into form; Yi also uses photography and drawing to give evidence of time. They are the world's landscape in her eyes; each picture or each line of the drawing shows her observation of this synthetic time and world. Yi also experiments with time-lapse, stop-motion, one-shot cameras, and long-period documentaries in films to describe time. |
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Over the last decade, Yi created a series of large-scale installations which project moving images onto sculptural surfaces and natural objects. The projected videos are made from Yi's documentary photos and video footage archive. For her two-dimensional works, Yi creates a series of drawings, diptychs, and polytypic paintings, which develop from her daily drawing project. Most of her works are worked in series, and each project is developed over a long period.
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The most significant resource for Yi's works is her life experience and the culture clash of the east-meets-west. She takes inspiration from her culture, background, memories, and a traumatised childhood.
Art practice allows her to bring new energy to the burden of memories and to deal with loss. Although the content of her work seems personal, the loss is a universal human experience. Yi believes artists' ultimate responsibility is to reveal universal truths through exploring their lives and experiences. When asked why did audiences have to be made to suffer through the three hours of his film Andrei Rublev (1966), Tarkovsky wrote in his diary : 'It's because the twentieth century has been the rise of a kind of emotional inflation….there are some artists who do make us feel the true measure of things. It is a burden which they carry throughout their lives, and we must be thankful to them.' (Tarkovsky, 1994: 9, entry 1st Sep 1970) |
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Many artists are obsessive in their way, for instance: Kusama's obsession with self- obliteration, Tarkovsky's obsession with his childhood memories, Hatoum's obsession with exploring the conflicts and contradictions of our world, On Kawara's obsession with the four decades in which he made Date Paintings. Shizico Yi's obsession might be to find the order in day-to-day living, to seal memories by documenting mundane moments, and ultimately to leave traces of her own existence.
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Nurturing Creativity: Shizico Yi's Endeavor with "no barking aRt" : as a curator and founder of no barking aRt
Shizico Yi is the driving force behind no barking aRt, a non-profit art project committed to curating exhibitions that uplift independent artists since 2013. This curatorial initiative has served as a platform for over 140 artists worldwide, facilitating their showcasing in esteemed galleries and located in central London. With an audience of tens of thousands, the impact of these exhibitions has been profound to these independent artists' career. Acknowledging the solitary nature of an artist's work, she has dedicated a significant portion of her artistic journey to supporting fellow contemporaries . Yi's belief in the transformative power of art extends beyond her personal studio. In her view, no barking aRt is an endeavor serves as a balance between her role as an artist and her responsibilities within our societal framework. |
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Solo Exhibition [ loss, repetition + the everyday]- The 3rd in a series of annual exhibitions in Brewhouse Gallery,
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Shizico Work Archivean up-to-date archive from 2013 to the most current projects
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GSY StudioGSY Studio is the brainchild of Shizico's creative energy, and it has run a design studio [ Gloria Shizico Yi ] and an art-charity project [ no barking aRt ] since 2013
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[ Favor Cottage Garden Project ]Constant Gardener is an ongoing project in memory of Favor, her beloved dog son. Started in 2015, it is a project of making a garden for then 14 years old ill Favor to recover. Shizu lost her beloved dog-son to Wobbler Syndrome after four years of battle with this neurology disease.
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