Yooyun Yang transforms overlooked crevices of urban contemporary life into fragmented excerpts, often depicting cropped close-ups of people and places with disorienting perspectives. Yang who was trained in traditional Korean ink wash painting creates works by painting layers of diluted acrylic on Jangji paper. With her distinct sensitivity, fleetingly mundane scenes become otherworldly and surreal. Her works which stem from photographs have a hazy and porous texture; juxtaposed with her use of chiaroscuro, the paintings are imbued with a cinematic ambience. Her recent paintings focus on hands displaying the palpable traces of manual labor, conveying the way labor has been undermined in an ultra-technological era.
Yang’s solo exhibitions were showcased in Primary Practice (Seoul, 2023), Night Gallery (Los Angeles, 2023), Stephen Friedman Gallery (London, 2023), CHAPTER II (Seoul, 2022), Amado Art Space/Lab (Seoul, 2019) and OCI Museum of Art (Seoul, 2014), among others. Her works have also been exhibited at Sejong Museum of Art (2024), Coreana Museum of Art (2024), Taipei Biennial 2023 (Taipei, 2023), Ulsan Art Museum (Ulsan, 2023), “58th Carnegie International” in Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, 2022), 8th Chongkundang Yesuljisang in Sejong Museum of Art 1 (Seoul, 2021), Seongnam Cube Art Museum (Seongnam, 2019), and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Cheongju, 2019), among others.
Yang currently lives and works in Seoul, South Korea.
