Failure and resiliency: MIAD professor talks adaptation and process

When he first applied for the Ruth Arts + MIAD Grant program, Jason S. Yi planned to attend the Berlin Biennale. However, the MIAD 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 MIAD 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 + MIAD 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 his website, learn more about the Ruth Arts + MIAD Artists Grant and explore MIAD’s Fine Art + New Studio Practice major!