I Am Painting

Jinny Yu’s work investigates the very nature of painting. By exploring the possibilities inherent to the uncommon medium of aluminum as canvas and its pictorial space’s naturally occurring sense of depth, she encourages reflection with bold brushstrokes on reflective material..

There is no effort to hide the artist’s particular movements; the marks left by her work proudly betray the movements of the brush across the surface. Rather, she seeks to reveal and underline the properties of her favoured material. The pictorial space (or illusional space) available in aluminum circumvents one of painters’ traditional objectives: to create the illusion of depth and a pictorial space by the measured application of paint(s) to a particular surface. Consequently, the eye can switch between exploring the reflective material’s vanishing point and noticing how the artist’s brushstrokes testify to the creative moment.

Today, Jinny Yu’s continued analysis of the art of painting has her probing the very walls on which the works are displayed. Creating an in situ piece, she puts her bold brushstrokes to work covering an entire wall with paint and reveals the wall’s innards through a porthole made with surgical cuts.

The act of painting itself is primordial to her approach. The ambiguous nature of the word painting, designating both the verb to paint and the artefact produced by that verb, reveal an underlying theme to Yu’s work: painting is painting.