Yim Ja-Hyuk

An accomplished watercolorist and draftsman, Korean artist Yim Ja Hyuk chose to work with etching to make a new body of prints during her residency under the BMW Young Asian Artists Series 2007. Taking motifs from her then-recent major wall installation at Korea’s Leeum-Samsung Museum of Art, Yim proceeded to transform her wall drawings into prints. The artistic process at STPI reversed her usual order of working from prints as studies for larger wall drawings, to using the latter as inspiration for the final product of print. Taking on this challenge of reducing larger scale ideas to works of a more intimate size, she found the task of cutting out all the plates and inking them in different colours an exciting prospect. This resulted in pieces such as The Extracted Islets, which contains various trademark images of her wall drawings. The choice and treatment of her subject matter, such as owls, birds, and the blood circulatory system, reflects the artist’s interest in the quirkiness of nature.