TEFAF New York 2025 Yoon Sang Yuel

Yoon Sang Yuel (b.1970) is a Seoul-based artist who graduated with a B.F.A. in Fine Arts from Kyungwon University and was selected for Expressive Activities at Seoul Foundation for Art Culture (2009) and was an Archive registered artist at SOMA Drawing Center (2008).

Yoon was a resident artist at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2007), and has exhibited at the Korea-Vietnam Contemporary Art Exhibition in Hanoi, Vietnam (2019); Renzo Cortina, Italy (2015); Window of K-Art, National Museum of Indonesia, Indonesia (2014). Yoon’s works are collected by the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Korea) and Daegu Art Museum (Korea), among other institutions.

“My works, which started from personal overcoming project, are expressions of many events, phenomena, and notions in total and accumulated signs from childhood memory to social experience. The results lead to natural scratches or afterimages 'Dust drawing', intensively shaped 'Optical evidence' and layers of 'Silence' with repeated piling up. In particular, for the silence, a continuous work in the belief that the attitude leads to an image, drawing lines shows horizontal images but the amplitude of the waves of the invisible irregular emotions that move up and down is huge. The sensitivities of such memories are to be rewritten after being erased from the gaps between the sheets of paper and films. The layers heaped up over the time will make a difference in the thicknesses between shadows and illusions.

The exploration of the thickness of lines, digital printing is the study of “fear,” an illusion that presents itself as reality. The series comprises vertical or horizontal lines, straight lines meticulously drawn manually or digitally. Mostly, working with linear paintings, the visualisation of memory, and personally written records is a striving for perfectionism that may only remain an illusion.

The series, Silence, so-called “linear painting,” illuminates a dark atmosphere, thus creating an illusion. With the utilisation of a mechanical pencil, Yoon draws lines with 0.3mm intervals in between lines and digitalizes the work by applying inkjet. In addition to the layers of thin film sheets he draws linear lines repetitively – the lines that carry emotional thoughts - create a sense of illusion.