Yooyun Yang transforms estranged moments and overlooked crevices of everyday life into enigmatic visual excerpts. Yang, trained in oriental painting, creates diluted acrylic paintings on Jangji paper—traditional Korean handmade paper crafted from the mulberry tree bark—yielding a distinct layered and nuanced quality. Her paintings suggest their photographic sources, and through her use of cropped close-ups, shadow and composition, the familiar becomes uncanny and cinematic. They conjure the psyche of contemporary urban living, capturing a unique sense of alienation and intensity, which she refers to as the “age of anxiety”.
Yang’s solo exhibitions were recently showcased in Stephen Friedman Gallery (New York, 2025; London, 2023), Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong, 2024), Primary Practice (Seoul, 2023), Night Gallery (Los Angeles, 2023), CHAPTER II (Seoul, 2022), Amado Art Space/Lab (Seoul, 2019) and OCI Museum of Art (Seoul, 2014), among others. Yang was selected as one of Korea Arts Management Service’s “Korean Artists Today 2024” and was recipient of the 2019 Chongkundang Yesuljisang. In 2022, her works were exhibited in the 58th Carnegie International in Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, 2022).
Her works have also been exhibited at HITE Collection (Seoul, 2025), Coreana Museum of Art (Seoul, 2024), Thaddeus Ropac (Seoul, 2024), Andrew Kreps (New York, 2024), Taipei Biennial (2023), Ulsan Art Museum (2023), Tina Kim Gallery (New York, 2022), the 8th Chongkundang Yesuljisang in Sejong Museum of Art 1 (Seoul, 2021), Seongnam Cube Art Museum (2019), and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Cheongju, 2019), among others.
Yang currently lives and works in Seoul, South Korea.
