Mi Yeon Yoon was selected through an agreement contract between ARKO (Art Council Korea) and Fundación´ace that builds artistic bridges linking both institutions. For her residency, Dorothy (Mi Yeon) Yoon developed her new project The Eye of Borges, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ blindness.

Everyone knows that the famous Argentinian writer was a “modest blind, because it is total blindness in one eye, but only partial in the other”, as he defined himself. A smaller number of people, though, also know that by the time he went blind, he had mastered the world of literature and philosophy, which are relevant to his fiction. But almost no one knows that he could not see black and red colors. “Others have the world, for better or worse / I have this half-dark, and the toil of verse”, as he declares in the poem “On His Blindness”.

Inspired by these facts, artist Mi Yeon Yoon created an “eye” printed with black ink on fabric that included a magical world that, probably, the writer would like to see. These big pieces built a dialogue with other, smaller “eyes” printed with red ink on paper. The magic eye that she created for Borges was related to her more recent project, This Moment is Magic, which she exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and deals with a line that bridges between her life and magic. In both projects, the work of sublimating life experience/illness in fantasy involves a sense of agony, illusion, erotism and wit—a process of associations, one after another. When a boundary emerges between reality and fantasy, the artist interprets it in her visual language.

Parallelly, the artist made a new set of her wands referring to both the Chinese Zodiac and the Western horoscope printing them with photolithographic plates.