Yoon Miseon has unfolded the inner self by varying her media across (calico) fabric and drawing. This exhibition introduces for the first time the painting works that Yoon has immersed herself in for nearly a year. In her paintings, her gaze turns back toward the other, much like her early fabric works. Unlike her pencil drawings, which focused more on a circulating plasticity based on self-portraits, the paintings summon onto the blank canvas the faces of others passed by outside car windows or on the street (and as images reflected in the media), as well as expressions imbued with dual emotions, rolling and scattering them as if pouring them out.

‘Sphere’ and ‘water mold’ are characteristic elements where images drawn on paper and canvas, or combined with scraps of fabric, converge, and they symbolically reflect the artist's worldview. First, the sphere is the central formative material with which Yoon depicts her subjects. While the geometric shapes emphasized in her pencil drawings, particularly circles, were mediums that connected and overlapped plane to plane and line to line to find a form of circulation, the sphere in her paintings is materialized through substances such as acrylic paint, pencil, charcoal, oil stick, and oil pastel. Riding the flow of lines where materiality is thus highlighted, inner emotions and bodily senses are revealed raw on the surface. Now, as the trajectory of the brushstrokes or lines tells us, the sphere is closed yet open, full yet empty.

‘Water mold’ directly refers to the water mold that occasionally bloomed on top of the water where Yoon mixed various water-based acrylic paints to create highly turbid colors. However, this does not stop at a physical phenomenon; it meshes with her re-recognition and expressive gestures, becoming the foundation for expanded thought. The water mold itself becomes a starting point for empathizing with the emotions shown by anonymous individuals, burrowing beneath the skin, and fulfilling a cyclical worldview that leads to staining, corrosion, and extinction. Therefore, the fabric portraits, made by cutting fabrics messed up with colorful paints, patching them together with an industrial sewing machine, and ironing them taut, are deeply connected to painting in that staining is regarded as an act of breathing a kind of heat (which triggers corrosion) into the material surface.

Staining, in which the dye of a fabric escapes and permeates elsewhere, is an accidental yet inevitable event. This working method, stemming from Yoon’s background majoring in textile art, encompasses her entire body of work. Furthermore, the self and the other, who are imperfect objects, are both perpetrators and victims who contaminate each other with immoderate emotions and attitudes within complex relationships.

Looking closely, the work <P26-3> is the profile of a middle-aged man encountered at a bus stop one day. On a sunny day, the man was trapped in his own prison, muttering angrily, and Yoon discovered herself stained by that starkly expressed emotion. <P26-8> shows a couple with their arms around each other on the street. The two created a strange discord between the woman's calm face and the man's complaining, grumpy face. This work, which was left as a drawing and then worked into fabric, was summoned back into painting. The work <P26-13>, modeled after a revered cleric, was newly worked into a painting following fabric and drawing, after Yoon learned through the news about the contradictory aspects of a nun who had been a sacred object. The intense red of the background vividly highlights the strangeness lurking behind the nun's gentle smile.

The literal emotions and actions encountered in the painting works are wounds poured out suddenly, as if a traffic accident occurred through the borrowed bodies of others. The shadow beyond the shaking eyes finally awakens like a spreading stain upon the entanglement of lines, planes, and colors, and finally breaks down slowly. For Yoon Miseon, this corresponds to Nature moving forward sequentially, leading to contamination, corrosion, and extinction.

Miseon YOON(b.1979) graduated from Hongik University (Seoul) with a B.F.A. in Textile Art. Yoon has held solo exhibitions at Gallery Kabinett (2025, 2022, Seoul), Noblesse Collection (2017, Seoul), Art Space Plasma (2015, Seoul), Gallery May (2015, Seoul) and Gallery Dam (2012, Seoul). Group exhibitions include Art Space HOHWA (2024, Seoul), Maison Ozmen (2023, Paris), Gallery Kabinett (2023, Seoul), FFF Contemporary (2023, Seoul), Able Fine Art NY Gallery (2013, Seoul), Gallery Imazoo (2011, Seoul) and Workroom Window Gallery (2009, Seoul).