Won Ji Lim

Won Ji Lim is an interdisciplinary installation artist who has exhibited in the Chicago area and Seoul. Recent exhibitions include the SAIC Gallery in Chicago, Compound Yellow Space in Oak Park, Illinois, The Museum of Contemporary Art and NONscaled Gallery in Seoul. 

The unstable constructs and machinations of Won Ji Lim are mostly made up of organic-based, easily decayable materials (such as hog casings, bananas, and soil) strapped by apparatuses and systems of pulleys consisting with steel, wire mesh, and / or rope. From rope pulleys to volatile suspended structures wrapped in hog casings, she creates purposelessly fragile systems which require maintenance and are temporary in nature. Even more stable-appearing installations such as Between Knots, requires periodical sessions of fastening the rope knots in order to remain as a cohesive structure. These fragile systems of installations are a direct conceptual conveyance on the psychological aspects of hypervigilance. Suffering from past instances of hypervigilance, Won Ji Lim would be on constant alert with her mind. For example, she would rewrite an entire page of an essay if there was one mistake or feel the compulsion to rearrange objects within her environments to be perfectly aligned. In essence, hypervigilance is a state where the brain does not rest and is in a consciousness of sustained alerted mania. 

Such a state of heightened awareness becomes conceptually symbolized in unstable pulleys, suspensions, and systems of decay within Won Ji Lim’s installations. She in essence creates ‘disturbed’ apparatuses which are intentionally broken or malfunctional in order to convey the constant state of disorder and chaos which comes with hypervigilance. We will notice in the installations the often consistent use of hog casings, which are essentially the outer layer of pig intestines, as a sort of macabre biological reference to the disturbing nature of hypervigilance, and as a result, these machinations. The systems of pulleys and ropes are equally fascinating, these specific works mark constant arrays of tension, especially in how they are constructed. These rope-based installations and constructs are tied, fastened, pulled, knotted, and stretched in order to create unstable systems of dysfunction. Won Ji Lim ultimately conceptually communicates a constant display of indirect disturbance. Upon studying the installations, they may appear to the viewer to be disjointed, fragile, dilapidated, in disarray, or even jury-rigged in order to portray a physical state of decline. This physical plane of disrupted consciousness derives from the incoherence of the mind affected by hypervigilance.

The installations with generous use of hog casings such as Held at the Edge particularly communicate a state of morbidity. As if we have traversed a dimensional plane where our dysfunctions and nightmares have taken a physical form. This hallucinogenic experience is what Won Ji Lim probably hopes from the audience to take from these installations, a sense of disruption from our reality as we enter this abyss and entities of organic abominations based on hallucinations of the mind, or at the very least, breaks from reality. In contrast, the installations with consistent use of pulleys and ropes, such as Something Takes Space, Between Knots, and Autonomic seem almost like systems of mechanical engineering. As if these were science projects, these particular installations seem to rely on fragile construction and regular maintenance. Although these installations appear engineered, they also seem temporary, unstable, fragile, and dilapidated. As if these were the machinations of a mad scientist concocting a diabolical plot, the engineered-appearing installations are a conceptual conveyance on the fragile systems within our understanding of provocatively-altered space and the distorted mind of the human psyche.

We will find the deeply conceptual, experimental, and complex installation works of Won Ji Lim are apparatuses built to have us question our states of consciousness and comprehension. Like a diabolical puzzle or sphere of hallucinations, we are intended to study these elaborate yet unstable machinations reflecting the severe mania of the mind. Through hypervigilance and a break from reality, she has us question states of systems as well as value structures based on aspects of permanence. The very fact her installations are temporary in nature based on some rapidly-decaying organic material as well with fragile instability which requires regular maintenance, reveals Won ji Lim’s physical constructs to be more similar to performances with conceptual narratives rather than traditionally-recognized  three-dimensional artworks.

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