REVIEW

Sangyoon Yoon

Stay, 2019, oil on canvas, 145 × 97 cm

Easy to Please

Sangyoon Yoon

Originally, Sangyoon Yoon painted with his right hand. His early paintings are realistic and sophisticated, showcasing his outstanding skills for delivering complex and symbolic narratives. For example, Switch-Off 2 (2011) shows a man speaking through a megaphone, surrounded by people soaking in water, as if taking a bath. Based on the title of the work, however, the man’s voice does not seem to be getting through. For Yoon, painting served as the ideal medium for creating scenes of such absurdity, often in colors with low saturation.

But in 2016, Sangyoon Yoon decided to restrict himself by trying to paint with his left hand. Lacking fine control of his left arm and hand, he struggled with detailed and realistic descriptions. Also, the long hours of work became more arduous with his left hand, so that his touches eventually became simpler and faster. Perhaps most challenging of all, the movement and strokes of the brush seemed to be executed by a completely different person. But his new technique offered at least one major advantage; no longer able to rely on existing painting conventions, he worked with more abbreviated expressions, enabling him to hone in on the core values of painting, such as materiality and spontaneity. Since then, Yoon has alternately painted with both hands, developing two distinct aesthetic worlds, as if there were two artists living inside him.

As his left-handed painting became more concise, the brushstrokes were emphasized on canvasses dominated by vivid colors that radiated beauty through their diverse palette, brightness, and saturation. Unlike his right-handed works, characterized by surreal themes with an almost architectural composition, Yoon’s left-handed paintings tend to depict people in scenes that resemble spontaneous, candid photographs. With their short, covert titles, these works resemble concise or compressed pictorial records of actual events, distorted by the derangement, delusion, and ambiguity of memories that flash through the mind.

The exhibition title Easy to Please might be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that Yoon’s sensuous and intuitive left-handed paintings often have more immediate appeal than his right-handed paintings, which require much more time and effort. Or it might express feelings of envy and anxiety towards the mysterious, free-spirited people in the left-handed paintings, who seem like characters in a novel. But the fundamental allure of Sangyoon Yoon’s left-handed paintings comes not from these characters, but from what they reveal about the artist’s own body, memories, desires, and identity.

Artistic Director Jinsang Yoo

The left-handed paintings are imbued with a soft, uncanny feeling that revives the taste of experience, which may lurk in their neutral or atypical expressions: faces without clear features, blurred boundaries between people and space, and extremely bold primary colors that may have come from the uninhibited brain of a reptile. That is, while the right-handed paintings are saturated with the fundamental pain that crushes humanity, to the point that they almost trigger the pineal gland, the left-handed paintings radiate with emotions that counteract that pain. Through this ambidextrous world, Sangyoon Yoon seems to shake the vertical hierarchy of right-handed painting with a horizontal order. Or perhaps the left-handed paintings are seeking to overthrow the right-handed paintings by enlarging their claim on existence, like a monster in the ego.

from review by Namsu Kim (art critic)

Sangyoon Yoon
b. 1978

Solo Exhibitions
2021	Juventus, CR Collective, Seoul
2020	Mean Old World, Artspace Hue, Paju
	Only Superstition, Atelieraki, Seoul
2019	Green Haze, Gallery Sejul, Seoul
2018	Sine Cera, Gallery Chosun, Seoul

Selected Group Exhibitions
2021	April Affordable Art Festival, Choeunsook Gallery, Seoul
2020	PAJU Act 2, Paju Book City, Paju
2019	Kahn Parade, Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul
	The Time of Painting, Sejong Museum of Art, Seoul
2017	Painting: World in the Frame, Oulim Art Gallery, Goyang
2015	Korea and China, Zhangjiagang Museum, Zhangjiagang
2014	Korea Tomorrow, DDP, Seoul
	Face of Desire, Space K, Gwangju
2013	Round Up, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
2012	Painting: Actual Creativity and Healing, Palais de Seoul, Seoul

Awards
2019	Young Artist Contest, Grand Prize, Hoban Nam-do Cultural Foundation
2012	CKD Art Prize for Art, Chong Kun Dang Holdings

Residencies
2012	HUE+NETWORK ART STUDIO, Paju
2010–2011	Seoul Museum of Art Nangi Residency, Seoul

Collections
MMCA Art Bank
Chongkundang
Zhangjiagang Museum

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Artspace Hue

Artwork Inquiry

Unconscious Landscape of a Society with a Clash of Collective Identity and Individual Desire
Kwang Jin Choi

Uniform themes running through Sangyoon Yoon’s work are observation of the tense relation between collective identity, which is coded and contextualized in a particular way, and personal desire, which is isolated and otherized from the group identity, and dealing with the subconscious human instincts emerging from such a relationship. Every society stipulates a group identity under the cause of social stability and unity and maintains itself by defending its own group from and attacking other groups. In particular, in a high-context society like Korea that stresses the value of the group and unity, there is an inevitable clash between group identity and otherized individuals.

Yoon, who grew up in a high-context Asian society, took an interest in the subconscious instincts of collective identity that had been formed without any realization. For instance, when he was a college student, he observed his unwitting aggression when some high school students intruded on the court while he was playing basketball one day. This incident sparked his interest in the subconscious instincts to protect territories. He also began to pay unusual attention to the unconsciously directed aggression toward those who cut in line against a group of people. After graduating from a university in Korea, Yoon went to England for further study because he had a strong desire to experience cultural differences firsthand. Territoriality is akin to a sense of entitlement that is exercised by the group against an individual who threatens the group’s collective identity. Although such group entitlement is a marked feature of high-context societies, which place greater importance on the group over the individual, it is a characteristic found in every human society.

Sangyoon Yoon does not intend to defend or criticize the culture of territoriality that emphasizes group identity. However, he reflects on it as human instinct and deals with the tense power relationship between the group and the individual. Hidden behind the cause of collectivization in every society is the political ideology aimed at gaining power. Members of a certain group share such ideology in an attempt to strengthen solidarity and obtain a guarantee for their safety and power. Such a contract inevitably made between society and the individual when the society grows does not ensure individual happiness. That is because such group identity can be a mechanism that suppresses individual freedom and desire and is likely to accelerate conflict and confrontation with others. Yoon’s works can be called unconscious landscapes of a society where collective identity, which is contextualized in modern society in this manner, clashes with individual desire.

In order to figure out how the tense relationship between the power of society and individual desire operates, Yoon walks a very fine line between reality and the subconsciously surreal situation with pleasure. Consequently, his works always depict vivid images of the society of our time where people are living in groups but are isolated from the context of reality and rearranged, thereby generating disconnected scenes. Water is a medium for the artist to transform the real into the surreal. With water filling up the ground, people are calmly doing something in the flood-like waters. This is far from a usual everyday scene.

Isolating a specific real-life image and rearranging it in a different context is the strategy Yoon uses to distance his works from the simple reproduction of reality without resorting to abstraction. In this way, he makes a real-life scene a surreal one, but does not deal with dreams and the subconscious like surrealist artists. Surrealist painters such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali made their own suppressed unconscious desires their subjects. On the other hand, Yoon focuses on the collective subconscious of society rather than his own unconscious and does not completely cut off reality.

Yoon does not approach the subconscious by intentionally juxtaposing foreign objects and depriving them of their usual meanings in the manner of Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte’s depaysement (disorientation). Images taken from different sources are combined in a very plausible and exquisite way and transformed into scenes that could possibly exist somewhere else. Such a thoughtful combination gives the viewer a familiar feeling of relief, but close observation makes it easy to notice that the images do not exist in reality. Yoon’s works are texts composed of images from diverse sources delicately woven together.

Particularly noticeable in such an organized structure are the individuals in the upper middle part of the canvas that are far removed from the group. Most of them are the artist’s friends or professional models. In Yoon’s works, the individual model standing away from the flock of people in the middle looks like a hero or an outcast marginalized from the group. Sometimes a human model is replaced by an animal, but this layout signifies an individual who is separated from the contextualized group at the center.

Sangyoon Yoon’s works typically have a three-tiered structure with water at the bottom, a group of people in the middle, and an isolated individual at the top. If Alfred Hitchcock, the legendary American movie director, used narratives to examine the relationship between the superego, ego, and id, Yoon delivers a multilevel structure in one frame like a film poster in his paintings. Because of this multi-layered space in which reality and the surreal, collective identity, and individual desire, as well as the conscious and subconscious coexist, his paintings simultaneously come to possess a concrete nature that calls attention to reality with poetic ambiguity, diverging from mere representation.

In his works with a three-tiered structure, images are liberated from their subordinate relationship with real-life objects and rearranged on the screen in attractive colors and a solid composition. This texturized organization turns his paintings into simulacre without origin or reality that resemble something but something that has not been seen before. By doing so, these familiar images form a connection with reality but do not converge into one fixed meaning, which leaves them open to different interpretations by the viewers. The artist’s textual strategy, which breaks away from the definition of representation through such conventional representation, sets his works apart from expressionist or surrealist works that focus on the expression of subjective emotions or the subconscious. The aesthetic effect of his works is not epistemological satisfaction that comes from referential meaning but ontological pleasure, that is, captivating feelings that stimulate the nerve system.