Yi Yunyi’s “A Son Older Than His Father”

Indeed, the first step of alchemical transformation, Nigredo, is a stage of psychological conflict and reckoning. This continued in The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (2019), a Himalayan pink salt sculpture that glows with projected images of snake scales that are overlaid with text from the Alcoholics Anonymous creed. Its principles are simultaneously self-supporting and self-indicting, calling for unsparing moral inventories and relational squaring. The sculpture’s brick composition, coupled with its solemn textual content, lends the piece a kind of gravity accorded to tombstones or altars. In alchemy, salt—a purifying preservative—is one of the three primitive substances that compose all things. Salt bricks represent an apt formal choice for displaying the 12 steps, which, like alchemy, strive for a higher form and wholeness in a physical and psychological sense.  

This exercise in self-alienation gave way to more complex levels of self-fashioning in the looped 24-minute video October to June (2019). Yi’s interpretation of individuation is more fully fleshed out in this work, which rewards repeated viewing as it plaits seemingly disparate scenes—ping-pong games with nuns, musical chairs—that eschew easy mapping. The cohesiveness of the video owes not to one obvious, pictorially linear narrative but to the fact that it is based on the various stages of alchemical transformation. 

The video opens with scrolling text that describes a friend of the artist who was hospitalized for delirium. As the video cuts to shaky footage of a man walking around aimlessly, the narrator observes him in relation to herself, looking for similarities. Shuttling back and forth between “I” and “him,” the narrator whispers: “Just like me, this person is seeking some happiness for their life. Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness, and despair.” Here, Yi instantiates Albedo, the next stage of alchemical transformation, comprising observation and identification of other subjects. 

Toward the end of the video, nearing the completion of the alchemical transformation, two children recite sentences and the boy says in Korean, “And your cheek and my cheek are swapped.” The Korean words for the possessive “your” and “my” are homophonous, though spelled differently. When spoken, there is no distinguishing between “your” and “my,” save for contextual clues. Although this may seem like a reversal of the process of individuation that had gradually crystallized in the video, it is perhaps an apt way to signify its final stage: one sounds like another but is a distinctly separate entity. “Tension,” reads the scrolling text, “is someone you think you must become.” In Yi’s works, the real subject is the clumsily fashioned self, floundering toward wholeness but unimpeachable in its right to alchemize.