Yu-Jin Sung

Cats are used as objects in which the individual’s psyche is projected in Sung Yujin’s paintings. She expresses psychological crises an individual faces in today’s society such as anxiety, depression, and trauma without reason’s grip, and transfers them to cats, a common subject. The contorted physique and dizzily turning eyeballs of the black cat is a tete-a-tete with mankind’s other self borne from neglected, repressed desires. The excessive physical distortion of cats apparent in previous works allow us to look into the core of an entity detached and dissevered from the ideal self. Instead, in recent works, the head of the cat can be seen to fill up the screen, its eyes closed, appearing more stable by the artist’s continuing usage of conte. The cat seems humbled by the repetitive drawing of conte, a free but hard-to-correct medium. Sung Yujin’s drawings, originating from desires but emptying them out in the process, now appears to be a countenance of self suffering and cogitating its symptoms rather than to show evidence of disunion and anxiety.

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