© Images Damian Griffiths

DAVID ZINK YI
FORMS OF MISLEADING

KÖNIG LONDON
3 SEPTEMBER – 2 OCTOBER 2021

Deploying pared down forms as a starting point, Zink Yi uses his studio as a laboratory for various ceramic experimentations that have resulted in singular and distinctive sculptures. Interrogating, and often stretching the material’s physical properties to their breaking point, each of these works offer an invitation into Zink Yi’s creative space. The title of this exhibition emphasises the playful configurations of his fired stoneware sculptures and a recurring and endless quest for meaning and form.

Each of the objects on display seem to have writhed, resisted, and rebelled while being kneaded, rolled, pressed, cut, glazed, and repeatedly fired at high temperatures. Revealing themselves only after having dramatically changed their molecular structure in the firing. These pieces oscillate between calculated scientific precision and the surrender of control, between quantifiable and enigmatic formal imbalances. In this way, the material becomes the artist’s closest collaborator.

Art historian Nina-Marie Schüchter has pointed out that, “through this alchemical transformation which the clay undergoes in dialogues with the artist, certain parameters of contemporary artistic practice such as performativity and process come to the fore”.

Functioning like an orchestra whose various components converse and respond to one another, these works, like much of Zink Yi’s oeuvre, defy any clear or singular categorisation. Wiggling, dancing, meandering, arching, and stretching, the objects occupy a liminal space between the architectural and the organic, poised between material fragility and spatial presence.

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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