Yang Yoo Yun : Face

Yang Yoo Yun explores the visualization of uncanny sentiments emerging in everyday situations when an individual in a community interacts with others. In the exhibition, Face, Yang Yoo Yun unveils her new series whose theme is ‘familiar fear’ achieved by attaching her collected footage and ordinary records with her subjective emotions and memories. 

 

Despite using one of the traditional oriental media—Jangji paper, Yang’s practice still conveys universal and practical traces of the digital era, for example, motion capture and artificial lighting. Thus, the effect of capturing moments of figures seemingly preoccupied with particular behaviours gives a subtle sense of awkwardness and distance among the characters, their situations and the spectators. The excessive exposure directly illuminating the subject and the aloof attitude of the painted figures who consciously avoid the light curiously evoke an extraordinary ambience overspreading her paintings. Especially the presence of light plays a methodological role in revealing or underlining the central subjects of the exhibited works, whereas it used to independently appear regardless of the particular context in her prior paintings. 

 

Yang’s original painting style of layering paint over Jangji paper efficiently delivers her outlook mentioned above. The multiple coats of the thin paint clearly reinforce its physical traits and allow the de-saturated sections to appear, creating a chilling atmosphere. She consequently manages that the situations the painted characters encounter and their hidden emotion steadily permeate without an immediate eruption, as though the artist carefully camouflaged familiar discomforts in the works instead of temporarily displaying volatile feelings. 

 

This exhibition signifies not only the result of the residency program but the opportunity for the artist to broaden her creative approach. Refusing to maintain her typical work manner in description modes, techniques and patterns of adopting colours, Yang attempts to focus on expressing images she intuitively comes up with without restrictions. It is worth paying attention to Yang Yoo Yun's new experiments in seeking out the contemporary sense from the oriental medium and expanding the amplitude of visual manifestation while she is adhering to painting on Jangji paper.