Trained in Korean ink wash painting, Yooyun Yang (b. 1985 in Seoul; lives and works in Seoul) reinterprets the tradition’s emphasis on realism and representational flatness to excavate the inner thoughts, anxieties, and worlds that permeate contemporary life. Central to the artist’s endeavor is the way she works with mulberry paper’s layered, pulpy surface through which light can permeate, while remaining highly absorptive to acrylic media and allowing for overlapping colors. Yang skillfully modulates the tonal saturation in her paintings to reveal psychological depth and emotional charge. The darkness of her paintings is elevated to subject matter, balanced by the artist’s acute attentiveness to the existence and portrayal of light.
In the 58th Carnegie International, the artist presents several paintings she describes as portraits, including the large-scale freestanding composition Beholder (2019). In these recent works, Yang captures fleeting, seemingly solitary moments that are rarely shared or socialized among a public. The artist obscures individual identity—depicting figures with their backs turned or covering their faces—achieving a feeling, mood, or attitude that emanates from the figure into their surroundings. In this way, the collective cultural toll of macropolitical events, such as a factory workers’ strike or student protest, live on in the private sphere. The artist explains: “What I am trying to show stands out when it is covered by darkness, more so than when it is explicitly depicted.”
