Lanna Lang – Looking Outwards – 08

Meejin Yoon – Eyeo Festival 2015

Meejin Yoon’s website: http://www.mystudio.us/

Meejin Yoon is an architect and designer based in Boston, Massachusetts whose practice revolves around the intertwining between architecture and the public realm. She studied architectural design and architectural practice at Cornell University. She didn’t have a background in technology until she became a faculty member in MIT, and then using her new-found knowledge to combine technology, architecture, and the public space to question how design fits into contemporary culture and creating a sense of place and environmental awareness.

Yoon is very focused on the separation between public space and personal space as she is a very private person. Yoon believes that in order to create a truly engaging public space, the artist must create something unfamiliar – defamiliarize the context such that the rules of engagement are less clear. These two values that Yoon holds throughout her work are what I admire about the way she works. This contradiction that her art is made for the public, yet she is so defensive and closed off as a person is very intriguing to me because in a sense, she is more of an open person than she thinks she is.

My favorite piece from her is “White Noise/White Light” because it encompasses everything that I try to include in my own installation work: human interaction with light, playing with sound in an installation, and exploring ways to incorporate technology and art. Another thing I really like about this piece is the fact that she created this work with a specific idea in mind in how people will interact with this work, but, in reality, people interacted with the work completely different than what she imagined. I love the idea of how once an artist puts one of their works in public, the work becomes something completely different than what the artist first envisioned. Another piece I really liked was “Aviary”, which was an installation that explored human engagement and human touch within a public space, combined with light fixtures, and a soundscape of bird songs. What I admired about this piece was her way of abstracting everything to the point that the audience physically interacting with the piece wouldn’t exactly understand what the installation was unless Yoon explained it. Compared to another piece she did, “Swing Time”, I enjoy “Aviary” more because “Swing Time” is very familiar and to me, kind of boring, as it is just beautiful tire swings that light up, versus “Aviary” which is very unfamiliar, yet also beautiful.

I really liked the way Yoon presented her work in this presentation. She would first discuss another artist/piece of work and what it was about, and then she ties that in as her source of inspiration in creating one of her projects, showing the connection between the two, yet how she explored and expanded that theme that she was inspired by. As she presents, she includes many photos of the materials that uses – especially the technological materials – as well as videos that document the work in the public space once it was installed. This helped me understand how I should present my work because now I know that as an artist, it is important to convey every step that I took to reach my final product.