91��Ʒ

When he first applied for the Ruth Arts + 91��Ʒ Grant program, Jason S. Yi planned to attend the Berlin Biennale. However, the 91��Ʒ fine art instructor needed to change gears and shift the focus of his project after discovering the biennale wouldn�t take place until 2025.

Yi discussed how he managed to pivot and reassess his grant-funded project, diving into failure and resiliency while exploring expressions of culture and environment. �I want to be as ambitious as possible when I’m thinking about my future endeavors. And sometimes when you’re trying to be too ambitious, you fail,� he explains of his application to the Ruth Arts grant. �I was proposing something for Berlin, and I was tying the Berlin Wall to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the sort of idea of borders. I would not have thought about that if it wasn’t for the possibility of getting the grant. So it opens up your mind to other possibilities and to be more ambitious.� Yi was one of 10 91��Ʒ faculty and staff to receive the grant for the 2023-24 academic year.

Although much of Yi�s practice has been sculptural, he also draws landscapes and explores other mediums to explore ideas of environment, geopolitics and how culture and landscape connect. Much of Yi�s work explores South Korean culture, including a series of drawings featuring celadon green frames, an homage to a ceramics glaze unique to South Korea.

Despite changing his plans for the Berlin Biennale, Yi still traveled and networked internationally. In particular, he enjoyed visiting art museums wherever he visited. �It holds not just art history, but it depicts the history of that land or that culture,� Yi explains. �I’m always amazed by things that I see from other countries.�

In line with his ideas about traveling, Yi thinks about property and �then I connect that to the landscape, our environment,� he explains. �So much conflict is happening around us. Our world is about land � I experienced it when I was growing up, when there was a North and South Korea and the divisions within the land based on politics and ideology.�

Yi continues this idea in his most recent phase of experimentation through the Ruth Arts + 91��Ʒ Artists Grant. He is making a flock of 50 life-sized red-crowned cranes, which can grow to 5 or 6 feet tall. The red-crowned crane population has benefitted from a surprising geopolitical landscape: the DMZ, which Yi describes as �Korea’s accidental Paradise.�

Red-crowned cranes, says Yi, are a motif �depicted in traditional Asian landscape paintings for ages, in Japan and Korea and China � They represent hope and peace and prosperity. And before the DMZ, they were critically endangered animals.� Yi�s flock of cranes, sculpted out of mulberry paper pulp, are �technically very, very challenging because everything is so top heavy and you have to approach everything on these two spindly legs,� he laughs. They will be shown at an exhibition in January 2026.

�I sort of look at this bird as a symbol of all the conflicted feelings that I have about the land, about the ownership of properties, about the conflict and about the ideas, hope and prosperity,� finishes Yi.

Keep up with Yi on , learn more about the Ruth Arts + 91��Ʒ Artists Grant and explore 91��Ʒ�s Fine Art + New Studio Practice major!