YI TO

Yi To’s painting practice is concerned with the excavation of deep bodily perception and primordial experience. The granular materiality of her surfaces directs visual experience toward archaeological associations—fossils, ruins, cave imagery, and remnants embedded in the earth. The faint and elusive forms and traces seem to emerge slowly from the sedimented surface of time, pointing to a primal vacancy charged with corporeal memory, and in turn producing an ambiguous structure suspended between figuration and abstraction, bodily representation and geological trace. Her works sustain a subtle tension between lightness and density, appearance and dissolution, and through an almost archaeological approach to painting, continue to probe the as-yet-unarticulated relations among the individual body, collective experience, and historical inscription.