by Yoon Ami

Artwork Description

The Minimum Spring

350.0 x 150.0 cm

I have long examined how accumulated and invisible psychological states take form within the inner self, and how the human mind finds its way outward through the body. Since 2005, the ongoing project Stories of Loss has dealt with the inescapable forms of loss we encounter throughout our lives. In the present era, we repeatedly experience similar anxieties and forms of social estrangement, becoming emotionally interconnected organisms. These heightened personal emotions and questions have sharpened my awareness of the crises unfolding around us and compelled me to ask: Why do we continue to sustain precarious relationships with others? In my practice, loss appears in multiple forms. Yet I do not focus solely on loss itself. What concerns me more is the posture with which we confront it—the human will to endure and overcome. Recording this will becomes a way of witnessing how we survive hazardous experiences; it is also akin to documenting the fundamental conditions that make our existence possible. Photography naturally functions here as a device of evidence, a medium that holds on to what has been overlooked. Through installation structures and staged compositions, the lost or suspended moments become more delicately grasped. This approach maintains anonymity, refraining from identifying specific individuals, and opens the work to a broader, collective narrative. In this way, photography becomes a circulatory language—one that assists in bearing witness. In [The Minimum Spring], the word “spring” holds a dual meaning: the act of seeing and the season in which life begins again. The “minimum spring” signifies the smallest unit of hope, the last remaining expectation, the faintest beginning, the most tentative first step, and the minimal threshold at which one confronts reality. Family is the first site in which identity is formed and the smallest unit of society; it is a foundational structure that determines the textures of one’s inner world, memory, and emotions. The psychological exchanges and incidents that arise within familial relationships leave profound imprints on the mind. Through this work, I confront the failure of protection. By addressing real cases of child abuse, I reveal violence disguised as care and the wounds concealed under the sanctioned name of “family.” The familial “embrace” becomes a fragment of memory reconstructed atop remnants of warmth, where the boundaries between love and violence endlessly cross and intertwine. Within this contradictory collision of emotions, I question how the ethics of protection can destroy the inner self and yet, paradoxically, make us long for that protection once more. [The Minimum Spring: A Dirge for the Child] focuses on the symbolic reenactment of actual child abuse cases. By capturing the psychological and physical violence that permeates daily family life yet often goes unnoticed, the work summons invisible structures of harm into perceptible form. Memory is the history of an individual, and history is the memory of a collective. What occurs within a single household eventually remains only as a private recollection. This work seeks to relocate such incidents into the realm of collective memory, reframing them as unresolved historical responsibilities that must be brought into public light. Ami Yoon — Artist’s Note

Artwork Details

Medium: Photography

Genre: Portrait