Coming up at Cafe Oto in May:
Jessica Hyunjin Kim X Li Yilei
£10 | £8 Advance | £6 Members | Buy tickets
Thursday 2 May 2019, 7.30pm
Cafe OTO | 18–22 Ashwin Street | Dalston | London E8 3DL | www.cafeoto.co.uk
Great double-header from London-based artists Jessica Hyunjin Kim and Li Yilei.
Jessica Hyunjin Kim
Jessica Hyunjin Kim (b. 1994, California, U.S.A) is a South Korean artist currently based in London. Kim’s artistic discipline stretches through a wide range of media, and isn’t pinned down to one area of practice. It ranges from drawings that, to her, are considered as personal and secret messages, or paintings and installations that concern performance and situations that are in between ‘happenings’ and ‘un-happenings’, through the use of pre-made objects or traditional materials. Interest in composing music slowly arose in more recent years. During her childhood, she was brought up listening to classical music, opera or jazz on a daily basis and was deeply influenced by the extensive CD collection of her father, who is also an audio collector and artist. Not only was she accustomed to listening, but she also began her classical training in playing the Cello, Danso (Korean flute), Gayageum (Korean strings), Piano and singing. Today, she deconstructs conventions and shifts her practice towards playing with the senses and improvisation. Her current project primarily explores space as a musical composition or a celestial sound diagram. Movement and distance become a part of the music. To play from one sound to another, the whole body must move from one place to the other. The gaps between notes become as important as the sounds that are played. To play space, is to play distance. In addition to distance and movement, there is also the play of speed, and what it means to play what is often left muted in space. The composition uses what the room can often offer such as the door, a window, table, chair, curtains or smaller objects such as magazines, a tissue box, radio, coffee machine, etc. And perhaps, a broken accordion that walks.
Li Yilei
Li Yilei is a London-based conceptual artist who works in the fields of sound art and performance art.
Spanning across sound, performance, multi-media installations and moving image, Li Yilei’s works are developed through a primarily conceptual basis. The works are the manifestation of an inquiry into tropes of phenomena, existence, power dynamics, and the politics of sound and listening. Li Yilei constantly examines the discriminatory perception of the world’s phenomena in its subtlest terms. Characterised by a replete of poeticism, lines are drawn across these seemingly disparate thoughts through a minimalistic approach.
In LI’s recent EP release “0:00”, LI uses found planetary sounds (Radio Signals from Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Mars & Saturn) to accompany the live performance of synthesisers and guitars to the back drop of terrestrial field recordings.
As an experimentalist in the field of music, Li Yilei often creates quasi instrumental sculptures, further integrating sound art into fine art, blurring its boundaries. Using obscure instruments and field recordings, the sound works are carefully designed and produced, ranging from cinematic atmospheric music to noise.
