Artist Statement:
Shopping transcends political, ideological and ethical boundaries and has become a universal, fundamentally human activity. Christoph Grunenberg

What are Americans passionate about? When he told New Yorkers shortly after the September 11th attacks to go shopping Mayor Guiliani was not just trying to avoid a local economic catastrophe. By encouraging his constituency to return to lives as normal as possible, the mayor invited listeners to allay their fears with their pocketbooks. We are a consumerist society that attempts to meet our emotional and spiritual needs by satisfying perceived material needs. Post 9/11, we continue to negotiate our now uncertain identities through our purchases. Yet there is no allowance for the universalizing themes and unified views of globalization. The new American identity is a contrast between our previous role as distant spectator of the worlds calamities and our current position as fearful victim. The fear is both external and internal marked by terrorism and our own broken safety culture.

The Cheryl Yun Collection is a range of image-based sculptural objects or products, from handbags to clothing, which simultaneously mirror and subvert fashion and consumer culture to reveal, question, and reevaluate ones relationship to the world.

The handbag series is hand-crafted and features newspaper photographs of tragedy and catastrophe, religious and political conflict, as well as issues of beauty and control. From the anguished grimaces of starving North Korean citizens to the expressionless botoxed face, the featured images contrast with the superficiality and transience of consumerism and the fashion world.

The Cheryl Yun Collection: Lingerie and Bathing Suit series takes two forms. The first is delicately crafted out of Japanese tissue and intricately patterned with nails, nuts, and bolts. The objects evoke romantic lace negligees, free-spirited bikinis and chic brassieres. The beauty and fragile nature of the object contrasts with the volatility and aggressiveness of the shrapnel.� The suits and sleepwear are frivolous and playful but at the same time terrifying and dangerous.

The second is an image-based series of underwear which questions the victims� and aggressors� of our current political, economic and religious conflicts. The underwear is replicated from images of suicide vests found online and in the newspaper. The images chosen represent the ambiguity of representation in our current political climate. The photographs are appropriated from the New York Times, scanned and manipulated in order to create a complex visual fabric. The process exaggerates the historic treatment of documentary photographs as well as the current manipulation and censorship by the media and government. Similar to the shrapnel, the patterned image is beautifully provocative. Whether embedded with shrapnel or constructed out of images, the garments represent our fragmented position between passivity and aggression, desire and repulsion, and good and evil, becoming substitute sites for hostility on the local as well as international level