Yoon Hyangro Reflects on the Plasticity of the Image

Yoon Hyangro b. 1986, South Korea Follow +

Yoon uses computer programmes to manipulate images, often gleaned from popular media, changing their size, perspective, resolution, and composition with a freedom that is difficult to access when painting with conventional tools.

The Screenshot paintings, for example, begin as screenshots of Japanese animations that the artist enlarges on Adobe Photoshop until they become echoes of what they looked like. Functions such as Content Aware Fill are useful, allowing Yoon to select and replace areas with computer-generated content that blends seamlessly with the rest of the image.

Undefined but suggestive forms emerge in fantastical hues of purple, pink, blue, and black in resulting works like Screenshot 4.00.30-011 and Screenshot 4.00.30-012 (both 2021), evoking otherworldly landscapes. Yoon’s process, repeatedly manipulating images and transferring them from the digital to the analogue in acrylic paint, pushes the limit of how an image can be represented and expanded through technology.

Although the ‘Screenshot’ series is perhaps more known for mirroring the uninterrupted surface of the computer screen, Screenshot 7.00.38 (2016) reflects light slightly differently. The wall-mounted carpet is made from nylon and polyester, and its velvety texture adds a sense of tactility to the exhibition. In it, jagged forms in shades of blue and green unfurl into the darkness beyond, interspersed with flecks of white that embody the pulsating rhythm of celestial stars.

Screenshot 7.00.38 is an example of Yoon’s early experiments with screenshots, when she explored diverse mediums such as lightboxes, videos, and drawings in an attempt to ’“paint” in various ways’ as Liza Markus, gallery manager at Gajah Gallery, told Ocula Magazine: ‘The artist is particularly interested in painting and how images are expressed today, and her concern began with viewing images transmitted through various devices.’

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Over the past few years, Yoon has increasingly focused on applying paint with spray cans and airbrushes, introducing an element of chance to her paintings in the ‘Tagging’ series. As the name suggests, these works delve into the act of ‘tagging’ or of labeling a name to an object. In her previous solo exhibition Tagging at CYLINDER, Seoul (6–30 October 2022), the artist spray-painted thin layers of paint onto large canvases. In works like Tagginng-T (2023) at Gajah Gallery, Yoon reduces the scale to small fragments measuring 10 by 10 centimetres.

Tagging paintings are much smaller than Yoon’s other works in the exhibition—the tapestry is nearly 3 metres in width and Screenshot 4.00.30-012 is 1.62 metres tall—though the explosions of colour within their dimensions vibrate with energy. The imprecise nature of applying spray paint to the surface makes it impossible to predict the outcome, resulting in the irregular dynamism that characterise ‘Tagging’.

The reimagining of the image persists in Yoon’s most recent series, ‘Drive to the Moon and Galaxy’. Drive to the Moon and Galaxy 1-2 (2022), for example, shows a blue-to-black gradient across the canvas. Cascading specks of black, lifted from 1980s and 1990s comics, mimic the captivating interplay of light and dark found in the night sky. Yet we only see what we can recognise and imagine, while the original remains lost. The image signifies limitless possibilities for change and, simultaneously, perpetual failure to fix it.

‘Imagine that you are standing in front of a large canvas,’ wrote art critic Soyeon Ahn on Yoon’s Screenshot paintings in 2018. ‘Some magnetic, glittering luminosity swallows and expands in space. Magic transforms into reality beyond the canvas’.¹ The force of Yoon’s creations lies in their ability to evoke such intensity, foregrounding the versatile plasticity of the image, and compelling us to re-evaluate the surface on which images form. —[O]

1 Soyeon Ahn, ‘Depth of Flatness’ in Surflatpictor (New Haven: Documents, 2018) catalogue published on the occasion of Hyangro Yoon’s solo exhibition Surflatpictor, P21, Seoul (10 May–10 June 2018).

Main image: Exhibition view: Hyangro Yoon, Drive to the Moon and Galaxy, Gajah Gallery, Yogyakarta (25 August–10 September 2023). Courtesy the artist and Gajah Gallery.