Soaring Grit

Inyoung Lee

Soaring Grit

Embroidery on Silk
193 x 105 cm
$9500

A result can be dressed up; a process cannot. In a world where everything is generated and discarded at speed, embroidery reveals me most honestly.
The quiet labour of embroidery rarely draws the eye. Still on the surface, it is dense work, built from accumulated time and endless repetition.
This brings to mind my parents, who raised me in a working-class home. Watching the endless repetition of their toil, I learned not the windfall of intellectual labour, but the diligence of work done by hand.
In both Korea and Melbourne, I have waited on the wealthy. As a server, I always stood as a mediator between the yin of the kitchen's labour and the yang of the dining room's privilege.
Unlike the aristocracy's literati painting, with its prized emptiness, Korean folk painting, Minhwa was an art of the common people, made to invoke abundance. Inheriting its spirit, I fill the surface with lavish abundance.
The class system is said to be gone, yet the labour of the lowly stays hidden in shadow while the marketing of the privileged shines in the light. As the needle passes through the cloth, binding yin and yang, I draw the traces of yin's labour in the colours of yang. Like the principle of 物極必反 (that all things, at their extreme, turn back), I imagine the labour condensed in shadow bursting into light, and with each repeated stitch, I pray for it.
Unseen as it may be, their lives are never weightless.

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Artworks currently on exhibition can be collected from the gallery at 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000 once the exhibition has concluded. Collection is available during gallery hours: Tuesday to Friday, 12–7pm, and Saturday, 12–4pm.

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