Yeodong Yun Objects

Yeodong Yun

Seoul-based artist Yeodong Yun works with metal in its full spectrum: shaped, brushed, coloured, and reconfigured into forms that move between sculpture, object, and installation. At the core of her practice is Jung Jung Dong (靜中動), a phrase she uses to describe her work: stillness that contains movement. Objects that appear stationary retain a subtle vibration, as if resonant with the passage of time.

Her influences reach deep into Korean history, particularly the gold crowns of the Shilla Dynasty, where fine metalwork embodied both fragility and permanence. The crowns’ suspended ornaments swayed with the movement of the body, suggesting life within form. Yun translates this sensibility into contemporary metalwork. Time is central to her language: her objects are conceived as if ‘shaken,’ echoing the inevitability of change and the instability that underlies even solid matter.

The Ball Series, developed for aarticles, draws these ideas into a sculptural yet functional collection. Each piece begins with a circular plate of brushed metal, its surface reflecting light with a restrained luminosity. Upon it rest spherical forms, polished but pared back, that guide balance and gravity. Their arrangement creates a rhythm of tension and release: static at first glance, yet suggestive of motion. The heaviness of the material is transformed into visual lightness, as if weight itself were in suspension.

Beyond their utility as tableware, these works operate as sculptural mediators of perception. They encourage the eye to follow curves, the hand to test balance, and the mind to reflect on the coexistence of order and chance. Their sculptural language carries echoes of other explorations into the physics of stillness and movement: Kim Tchang Yeul’s painted water drops, Adriaen Hanneman’s 17th-century portrait of a jeweller where adornment seems poised to tremble, or Harold Edgerton’s 1936 Milk Drop Coronet, a photographic study of suspended motion. Even the diffraction patterns of fiber analysis, where waves bend and scatter, find resonance in the displacements that Yun builds into her objects.

Through metal, a material often coded as rigid and enduring, Yeodong Yun composes atmospheres of delicacy and uncertainty. Surfaces catch light but never fully hold it, curves suggest movement but remain bound in stillness. The Ball Series embodies this paradox with clarity: sculptural yet functional, minimal yet alive, each object shaped by a philosophy that understands life as a balance between permanence and change.