YOOYUN YANG’S BENIGN IMAGERY IMBUED WITH THE MYSTERIES OF PERCEPTION

Yooyun Yang, “Dot3”, 2025, Acrylic on handmade Korean paper on panel, 35 7/8 x 28 ¾ inches. © Yooyun Yang. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Andy H. Jung

 

By EDWARD WAISNIS July 2, 2025

Most artist’s have enhanced senses that permit them to focus via a heightened sensitivity; in short, channeling their creativity in service to their work. Yooyun Yang brings not only a keen sense of observance–of the quotidian, the fleeting, and the cast aside–but a ferocious deftness of craft. In her paintings she forwards the medium of working on Hanji, informed by training in Oriental Painting in her native Seoul.

This background, coming from a tradition that has valued paper for art making for centuries, has provided Yang with a firm foundation on which to expand interests beyond mastery.

Uncommon Sight consists of two strains of work in the exhibition comprised of fourteen acrylic on mulberry paper paintings. Namely, portraiture and still life dealing with the punctum where loss of definition questions, or subverts, reality and, alternately, glimpses from the edges of pedestrian existence.

YooyunYang, “Unknown”, 2025, Acrylic on handmade Korean paper on panel, 46 x 35 7/8 inches. © Yooyun Yang. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Andy H. Jung

 

Roughly one half of the group of works included in the show, compromised of six works, are drawn from portraits of figures (mostly headshots)–a preponderance being of the artist. The snapshot quality, in which seem to been taken at moment’s that catch a movement, or light flare, are capitalized upon, recalling the persistence of peripheral vision in reflections and glitches. Reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s family portraits *, with differences residing in the physical softness of Yang’s acrylic on handmade Korean substrates † versus Richter’s cooly austere sheen of oil glazes. Further, Yang’s ghostly evocations whisper to the sfumato technique so proficiently spearheaded by Leonardo da Vinci.

YooyunYang, “A hanging rope”, 2024, Acrylic on handmade Korean paper on panel.54 3/4 x 28 3/8 inches. © Yooyun Yang. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Andy H. Jung

 

The other eight works, sourced from (found?) images of innocuous bits of unfinished construction sites, bereft of figures (workers). One, A hanging rope, 2024 might be a wrapped up sash, or clothesline, dangling from the fringed edge of a canvas patio awning. Given it's designation, might this be preparation for a nosse, or rumination on its unsavory useage?

YooyunYang, “Blurred Borderlines”, 2025, Acrylic on handmade Korean paper on panel, Two parts, each: 20 7/8 x 25 5/8 inches; overall: 20 7/8 x 52 3/8inches.© Yooyun Yang. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Andy H. Jung

 

Two outliers–Blurred Borderlines and Firewood, both 2025–align with the two prevailing factions from somewhat oblique angles. Blurred Borderlines, a diptych of a close cropping on somewhat disturbing eyes of a character in mid-glance which can also be taken in as a purely formal abstract exercise. Which, frankly, is how I took it in, that is until I caught a glimpse of the thumbnail of the digital file whose scale brought the concrete to bear.

YooyunYang, “Firewood”, 2025, Acrylic on handmade Korean paper on panel, 25 5/8 x 20 7/8 inches. © Yooyun Yang. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Andy H. Jung

Firewood, while presenting a close-up of glowing embers, because of the engaging figurative warmth it casts, coupled with the composition’s anatomical connotations, could be a transmission from a capsule endoscopy camera, or a particularly colorful illuminated X-ray (MRI, or Ultrasound, using more updated medical parlance). Yang appears to have taken a side in this slippage of interpretation, in her choice of title. However, this might be a playful misdirect.

Yang’s accomplished devotional classically illustrative style lends itself to narrative consideration, aided by the artist’s penchant for a sense of suspended mystery–often referred to with the term uncanny–found in the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and even Haruki Murakami, as well as the teleplays Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, as well as the Korean television series Light Shop (or, the films of Georges Franju, for that matter). In short, the work offers a gentle twenty-first advanced Surrealism. Yang’s spirited renderings of reality sing to the heart with a forlorn mournfulness.

YooyunYang, “Visual error”, 2024, Acrylic on handmade Korean paper on panel, 51 1/4 x 63 7/8 inches. © Yooyun Yang. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Andy H. Jung

 

Visual Error, 2024, might just as well be a film still from one of these programs. Yang harks to a similar work, from 2022 (The Site), that featured a scene she had come across, thinking she might have come upon an inert body rather than than a conglomeration of stage lighting scattered on the floor, her confusion played into her existent headspace. Here–and, even to a greater extent in Organ and Over, both 2025–the endowment of precision bordering on the scientific could be taken as an ode to the underrated work of Walter Tandy Murch updated to the twenty-first century. Organ, similary to Firewood, brings a mortal aspect, invoking a vital internal body part, strengthened through the title.

Yooyun Yang,“Organ”, 2025, Acrylic on handmade Korean paper on panel, 63 7/8 x 51 1/4 inches. © Yooyun Yang. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo: Andy H. Jung
 

Yang’s deep well of evocation, put to service via a synthesis of east/west dichotomy that communicates a reliance on the viewer to complete the picture, and accomplished technique, has bestowed her practice with a richness of substance (material) and emotion (feeling).

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* There is also kinship with the paintings of Luc Tuymans and Wilhelm Sasnal.
† Stretched, or attached, to panels in much the same manner as canvases. And, incidentally, generationally contemporary painter Joseph Yaeger, whose work share similarities to Yang’s, uses watercolor on gessoed canvas.

Yooyun Yang: Uncommon Sight
Stephen Friedman Gallery
54 Franklin Street, New York, NY
May 29–July 18, 2025