In the ‘top young 2014’ supervised by the Ubi Gallery, a renowned gallery for contemporary craft located in Beijing, China, Ji-won Yang (class of 2009) from the Department of Metalwork & Jewelry in the College of Design of Kookmin University was selected as the honorable top 3. In this contest that was promoted for the undergraduates and graduates majoring in accessories in Asia, about 50 people from Asian countries competed and as a result, final 10 artworks were selected. Among these, Ji-won Yang was selected as the top 3 through an in-depth evaluation.

The works of Ji-won Yang are animal-shaped brooches that used vinyl and plastic. The characteristics of each animal were presented using waste vinyl that is attached to realistically expressed metal. Such approach was highly evaluated as it maximized visual entertainment through material contrast. The exhibition of award-winning artworks was promoted in Ubi Gallery, China from August 22nd to September 17th. Also, the top 3 artists will be invited again for the exhibition of the ‘top young 2015’ to be held next year.

Since it was hard to express informal and custom shapes in metal, Ms. Yang seriously thought about the ways of artistically expressing metal. She came up with an idea to combine vinyl and plastic with metal and it resulted in a fairly good outcome. From then on, she developed the idea in earnest. Especially, she started using waste vinyl as she wanted to utilize useless common objects for her artworks and as she used more amount of vinyl, some stories of each work came up.

About taking animal as a topic, she was interested in the characteristics of animals and their stories as seen from the human perspective. Thus, she started interpreting these parts with her own idea by making the best use of something useless to draw significant meanings.

Ubi Gallery is a gallery of contemporary craft and it was established in autumn of 2012 by Machtelt Schelling from the Netherlands. ‘Ubi’ means ‘where’ and it reflects the intention to provide adequate platform for communication between designs and artists with the public while introducing contemporary crafts through artworks. Mainly, much stress is given to contemporary accessories and potteries and by presenting contemporary accessories made of experimental materials, it seeks and explores new possibilities.