Courtesy Galerie Hauser & Wirth. © David Zink Yi/MAK.
MAK Gallery Stubenring 5 1010 Vienna Autriche
In the center of the upcoming exhibition "Manganese Make My Colors Blue," opening 5 October 2010, at the MAK Gallery, is a room-filling six-meter ceramic sculpture, produced in a labor-intensive process especially for the MAK, as well as a selection of recent photographs by Peru-born artist David Zink Yi. Relating art and nature, he takes up the tradition of the cosmopolitically inspired cabinets of art and curiosities of the 16th to 18th centuries. Another influence on Zink Yi's choice of motifs is the artistic examination of scientific research that came to pass in the 1920s when models from nature were incorporated in the Modernist canon of forms.
In the exhibition, the sculpture which is modeled on the Architeuthis, the giant squid, a fabulous ancient sea animal, is juxtaposed to nighttime photos of a cedar. The pictures oscillate between abstract motif and suggestive metaphor. Together with the sculpture and the whole atmospheric setting that Zink Yi develops for the MAK Gallery the objects unfold into studies of form and aesthetics, matter and transformation. Interested in its unique anatomy, Zink Yi translates the lifeless body of the squid, a mythological creature and much represented subject in fine and applied art well up to the mid-19th century, into contemporary sculpture.
The counterpart of the sculpture are large-sized photographs of a cedar, the motif of an abstracting understanding of form and a dualist symbol of the division between nature and culture as well as a vision of a universalist world view. Photographed at night, the structure of the tree transforms into an apparently three-dimensional carrier of color and light. In the interplay of formations of organic structures, which he sets up as models, as it were, Zink Yi operates in the field of tension between reality, materiality, and the dissolution of narrative interpretation.
The artwork of Zink Yi, born 1973 in Lima, Peru, comprises sculpture, installation, photography and film. Thematically, Zink Yi, who lives and works in Berlin, addresses universal issues of identity and world-view. Starting out from analytical creative processes, he subtly formulates social stocktakings that reflect breaches of cultural codes. Based on intensive research and innovative ways of production, the development of Zink Yi's projects frequently takes several years. In a fragmentary manner, he also introduces biographical references and mythologically charged visual narratives that combine into scenarios between reality and fiction.
David Zink Yi studied at the Munich Art Academy from 1997 to 1999 and at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1998 to 2002; in 2002/2003, he was in the master class of Lothar Baumgarten. Selected solo exhibitions: Galerie Johann König, Berlin (2010); Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2009); Open Space – Art Cologne (2008), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2006); Kunstraum Innsbruck (2005).