This Time Being 2013

This Time Being 9 is one of nine sculptural portraits Jin-me Yoon created by draping, hanging, and propping a soft rubber sculpture in a variety of outdoor environments. Yoon’s most abstract, formal series, This Time Being is a highlight that indicates the central importance of constructed form throughout her oeuvre, even when form might appear to be secondary to content. With this project, Yoon turns to the non-human world to reimagine relationality. By virtue of the precarious positioning of the rubber, which moulds itself to its environment, the works in the series imagine a reality in which humans rethink their relationships to their environment and to each other and let go of their primacy in the world.

In this, the series is similar to Relatum, 1969/2012, a body of work in which the artist Lee Ufan (b.1936) allowed stone blocks to drop onto sheets of glass, foregrounding conditional and provisional relations. Unlike Lee’s Relatum, which exists purely on geological and philosophical scales, Yoon’s This Time Being works also evoke human relationships and material histories.

Yoon recounts that the portraits were shot on Hornby Island, where the artist has made a home for several decades, and many are sited in the gardens of close friends Wayne and Anne Ngan, who also feature as subjects in Living Time, 2019, where lived time is contrasted with geological time. Here, the material reads as an outsider. The rubber itself, although synthetic, alludes to colonial histories of rubber production and circulation, and seems somewhat out of place in these Edenic settings. Leaning, folding, and drooping, the material emplaces itself lightly, and builds relationships of gravitational interdependence with its new ecosystem. In these unexpected spaces, new sets of temporary and contingent relationships are created, opening the possibility of a new and relational sculptural form.