DAVID ZINK YI
GWANGJU BIENNALE 2023
ALL MY COLORS

14TH GWANGJU BIENNALE, GWANGJU, SOUTH KOREA
7 APRIL – 9 JULY 2023

From landscape photographs to jazz music to ceramics, David Zink Yi’s works are grounded in a deep and investigative relationship to the body, specifically the artist’s hands. For his contribution to the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Zink Yi has chosen to present a series of 257 colorfully glazed sculptures entitled ALL MY COLORS, 2023. In their installation, the repeated ceramic forms recall the serial arrangement of color samples, though their biomorphic shapes also summon traces of organic life – fish, slugs, or other water creatures. Each of the individual pieces also function like notes in a musical composition, relational, yet fully their own, though their impact is best appreciated as a group. This tenuous arrangement of parts offers a model of balance and unity within a diverse amalgam of colors.

ALL MY COLORS thus helps to articulate the core concerns of the 14th Gwangju Biennale, which seeks to imagine our shared planet as a site of resistance, coexistence, solidarity, and care by thinking through the transformative and restorative potential of water as a metaphor, a force and a method. Both the water-based glazes and sea-like forms animate this theme, and does so with the utmost care and pervasive gentleness. According to the Dao De Jing, “there is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things” (Chapter 78). The Biennale’s aims to highlight the capacity of art to permeate deeply into the individual and the collective simultaneously, enabling us to navigate the complexities of the world with a sense of both awareness and direction.

FEATURED ARTIST

DAVID ZINK YI
David Zink Yi (b. 1973 in Lima, Peru) lives and works in Berlin. He explores the body as a site of identity, memory, and transformation, engaging with a wide range of media in the process. From video and sculpture to ceramics, sound, and performance, his art reflects his complex heritage. As a descendant of Indigenous Peruvians, as well as Chinese, Italian, and German immigrants, his own body – situated at the intersection of diverse cultural identities – becomes a focal point in his practice. Zink Yi’s earliest works focused on self-reflection, using the camera to develop a form of self-ethnography. This approach later evolved into a prot...
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