Los Angeles-based artist Yunhee Min uses a custom-mixed palette to create “banded” color-field paintings and large-scale installations that interact with the architecture they occupy. Double Positive at Artpace explores the way physical interventions can acutely intensify the awareness of space.
Double Positive has two elements, one of which has been built in the office area behind Artpace’s windows at 445 North Main Avenue. The four-sided structure reveals that the space around it, despite appearing harmoniously square, is actually disorientingly trapezoidal. The intrusion of the form, which leaves a passage of only a few feet around it, attracts attention not only to itself but also to its surroundings.
Min’s swaths of purple, green, and pink also fill four window bays at 306 East Houston Street. The windows mimic the interior walls, highlighting the idiosyncratic nature of each area: the dimensions of the seemingly identical bays differ by as much as a foot. Although the piece can be experienced only from the street, it leaves room for the viewer to imagine circling it along a narrow corridor bounded by the walls and windows.
In its various manifestations, Double Positive serves Min’s purpose of disrupting traditional spatial relationships by combining formal abstraction with the socially oriented genre of site-specific installations.
