Jayoung Yoon in her studio at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, where she has a yearlong residency.
Michelle Falkenstein/For the Times Union
Last August, artist Jayoung Yoon began a yearlong residency at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. Several days a week, she travels from Beacon, where she lives and works, to a bright studio on the museum’s sixth floor.
At the front of the studio stand several clear vitrines, each holding a different artwork. One contains a sheer black vessel with five small white vessels nestled inside it. Delicate and fragile, the piece looks like it would blow away in a breeze. And there’s good reason to think so: “The Offering Bowl 07” (2022) was woven and knotted by Yoon using her own black hair and her mother’s white hair, one of several in a series.
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This tender meditation on motherhood and connectivity is just one of the many meticulous artworks made by Yoon using hair, both human and equine. In addition to weaving hair, Yoon also uses it as one would a pencil line to “draw.” She also embroiders hair onto fabric. Weaving hair is painstaking work, and a single sculpture can take three or four months to complete.
“I believe hair has some spiritual power,” Yoon said. “I’m interested in mindfulness and interdependence.” She finds inspiration in Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics, hoping her work creates contemplative experiences for her viewers.
In 2019, Yoon participated in an artist’s residency at Millay Arts in Austerlitz, and this year she was chosen to participate in a group show of Millay Arts alumni. “With Quiet Eyes” opened at Time & Space Limited in Hudson on May 23 and runs through June 20. Yoon has three “Offering Bowls” made of hair in the show.
“With Quiet Eyes”
Where: Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia St., Hudson
When: Galleries open daily at noon. Show is up through June 20.
More info: timeandspace.org/galleries. Free admission.
Monika Burczyk, Millay Arts executive director, praised Yoon’s development as an artist since her residency.
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“She’s really evolved in the best possible way,” Burczyk said. “I think the use of her own hair is something that is really intriguing for people and intrinsic to her practice. She expanded her material choices, and that speaks to a maturity in her work.”
“The Offering Bowl 02,” one in a series of intricate pieces Yoon made using her hair.
Courtesy of Jayoung Yoon
Yoon, 46, was born in Seoul, South Korea, the second of three children, and earned her BFA and MFA from Hongik University in Seoul in 2004. She came to the U.S. to study at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and received her MFA in fiber arts there in 2009.
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Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art in Peekskill, and Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, among others. In addition to Millay, she has attended residencies at MacDowell in New Hampshire, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, and Sculpture Space in New York.
As a child, Yoon says she was sensitive to past family traumas — the Japanese occupation of Korea during World War II, the Korean War, the death of young siblings for both of her parents, the division of the country — and she wanted a way to cleanse herself of these collective recollections and move forward.
“I was looking for materials that deliver bodily sensations and represent memories,” she said.
Yoon began by using her own hair, growing it long and shaving her head. For a performance at Skowhegan in 2009, she wove an abstract structure from her shaved hair that pointed into her ear and extended up into a cloud shape, like a thought bubble. She built a large white cube box, installed it in an open field, and lay naked inside the box with the sculpture emanating from her ear for 10 hours with five-minute breaks per hour.
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“It was transformative for me,” she said. “I began a meditation practice after this.”
Jayoung Yoon’s worktable at her studio at the Museum of Arts and Design.
Jayoung Yoon
In 2023, Yoon spent a month on Jeju Island, South Korea’s largest island, to learn 14th-century hat-weaving methods. She now makes traditional Korean hats using horsehair, which must be wet when woven or it can easily snap.
When working with human hair, Yoon first washes it in baby soap, lets it fully dry, and examines it for imperfections. She then weaves and knots it on maple, cherry and cypress wooden forms that she carves herself on a wood-turning machine. In addition to the offering bowls and abstract forms, she has used hair to make sculptures of gloves, socks, shirts and a human skull.
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Once each piece is finished, she submerges the whole assemblage into boiling water for 20 minutes, fully drying it before removing the weaving. Other materials that have appeared in her work include milkweed seed fiber, bird skeletons, thorns and feathers.
Yoon is currently working on a series called “The Fabric of Energy,” inspired by a shape called a torus, which looks like a puffy donut. In this geometric form, energy flows out from a central axis, curves around the exterior, and returns to the center in an infinite, self-sustaining loop.
For one of the pieces, Yoon is soliciting hair donations of 10 or more strands that are at least 3 inches long. The hair should be gathered from brushing, combing or cutting, but not from the drain. Yoon also asks donors to tell her what positive energy they want to contribute to our world. Details can be found on her website.
“The Fabric of Energy,” a new piece Yoon is working on.
Courtesy of Jayoung Yoon
Lydia Brawner, the deputy director of education at the Museum of Art and Design, said that over 3,000 children from New York City public schools visit the museum each year. Yoon’s work was like nothing they had seen before.
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“She uses a very traditional Korean process and turns it into a modern idiom,” Brawner said. “The response has been amazing. People are excited by what she’s doing.”
Yoon sees interconnection as not just a spiritual idea but as something increasingly visible in the world.
“We are already woven together — we have never been separate,” she said. “If my work can do anything, I hope it offers that experience.”
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