Yoon Hyangro's 'pseudo-paintings', as the artist describes them, explore the ways in which images are made, remade, and re-perceived by transferring digitally manipulated images onto the canvas.
Read MoreYoon was born in Seoul, where she also received her BFA from Hongik University and MFA from Korea National University of Arts.
Yoon draws together images from manga, comics, and animations, and then expands, crops, and edits them in Adobe Photoshop. The images, rendered unrecognisable and abstract, are then screen- or inkjet-printed and painted over using an airbrush to imitate the smooth, uninterrupted surface of the computer screen.
Layers of images, usually edited to shed parts of their original form, are central to Yoon's work. An early example is the 'Blasted (Land)Scape' series (2012–2014), consisting of works on canvas, prints, and videos that derive from the internet as well as manga and anime popular during the 1990s.
For works such as the inkjet print CSI-785 (2014), Yoon painstakingly erased the texts and characters of a manga page on Photoshop, leaving only the speech bubbles, background, and effects. The resulting work asks what an image might offer when centres of the narrative are gone, and exposes the narrative hierarchy that the human brain continues to enforce upon visual effects presented in succession.
Yoon first garnered critical attention for ASPKG (A-1, A0, A1, A2, A3, A4) (2018), a group of canvases commissioned for the 12th Gwangju Biennale in 2018. Standing upright on the floor, the paintings recall domino blocks and depict similar images—blocks of blues, yellows, and white suggestive of abstracted landscapes.
The paintings grow proportionally larger from the front to the back. By varying their dimensions, Yoon considers the physicality of the painting as an object while drawing attention to their flat surfaces as a plane of representation.
In 'Screenshot' (2016–2018) Yoon focuses on the beams of light and energy found in popular anime such as Sailor Moon. Compared to 'Blasted (Land)Scape', the 'Screenshot' paintings are even more abstract in their extreme close-ups, the urgency of the original scenes compressed into a single moment.
Yoon incorporated the personal into her pseudo-paintings in Canvases, her solo exhibition at Seoul's Hakgojae Gallery in 2020. Three layers of images or paint comprise each work, the first being close-ups of passages detailing American painter Helen Frankenthaler's practice, especially her references to Classical painting. In the middle, Yoon airbrushed snippets of her own life, including the abstracted depiction of the wrinkles on her wedding dress, followed by the enlarged reproductions of her child's scribbles on the topmost layer.
Yoon Hyangro has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Tagging, CYLINDER, Seoul (2022); Canvases, Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul (2020); Surflatpictor, P21, Seoul (2018); Liquid Rescale, DOOSAN Gallery, New York (2017); Blasted (Land) scape, Insa Art Space, Seoul (2014).
Group exhibitions include Whose Story Is This?, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (2022); The Fool on the Hill, ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul (2022); the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018); A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Digital Art Center, Taipei (2016); Young Korean Artists 2014, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2014); The Song of Slant Rhymes, Kukje Gallery, Seoul (2013).
In 2023, Yoon Hyangro was announced as one of 13 artists chosen for the Korean Artists Abroad programme supported by Korea Arts Management Service.
Hyangro Yoon's Instagram account can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2023
