Newtown # 01: SunKoo Yuh

Today was the first official day of the course I am on, Work Intensive III: Figurative. I will post a few pictures of my work as it develops, however I also want to focus on the visiting artist we have each day.

Today the first speaker was SunKoo Yuh, an artist who I wasn’t familiar with until recently, which is clearly a travesty.

SunKoo’s work is very different to what you would usually expect from figurative ceramics. They display a kaleidoscope of culture through a riot of colourful dripping and bleeding glazes. To me they are reminiscent of a modern day version of the kind of beautiful statues you would find peering out of overgrown vines in some lost Asian temple. The main reason for this is how overgrown they feel to begin with. This is not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination; the fact that SunKoo’s pieces display such an intense collection of varying characters means that from whatever angle you look at them from you can take an entirely different interpretation on the piece. Looking at one of his creations from one angle you may see a leering pig sticking its snout out menacingly, whereas from another angle it may be a muscle man flexing in speedos.

The main “theme” of the work is that of the Mundane. He observes the intricacies and subtleties of day-to-day life to create a pseudo-diary of the elements going on around him and this freedom of understanding means that the viewer is free to draw their own conclusions and parallels from the work through their own subconscious filters even more so than usually happens with art.

As a ceramicist one of the main things I have learned today is that even the best of us end up with cracks in our work occasionally, and on those occasions a combination of filler and the expression “the cracks are just part of my process” is both your friend, and your get-out clause. However, on a serious note the idea that as a three dimensional artist you should be producing work that is interesting from all angles is both absurdly obvious and completely counter-intuitive to what I think is a lot of people’s views on sculpting is. This is absolutely a concept that will stick with me and will hopefully develop my own thinking processes and work (which incidentally currently an albino alligator, but shh…)

Tomorrow the artist is Gerrit Grim, who makes incredible large scale figurative sculptures using wheel-thrown elements.