Speaking to ‘Anxiety’
Ah-young Yu’s “Brown Figures” and the Emergence of a New Gaze
No one welcomes anxiety.
Born from a premonition about possibilities without form, it unsettles our sense of meaning and undermines the stability of everyday life. Anxiety is at once blunt and sharp, quiet yet loud enough to tear at the heart. It eats away at dignity, erodes trust, and places a heavy stone deep within us. It can feel like the ominous stillness of a deep lake or the fierce crash of a raging wave. Beneath resentment, jealousy, desire, doubt—even inexplicable self-loathing—anxiety persists with relentless tenacity.
Yet anxiety can also awaken us.
It shakes us free from the familiar routines and structures of daily life, confronting us with the strangeness and uncertainty at the root of existence. Within anxiety, the outer shell of life falls away, revealing the abyss of our being. Painful as this may be, it can also be a transcendent moment—a reminder of the weight and meaning of being alive. As Martin Heidegger observed, anxiety may appear to nullify existence, yet in truth it estranges the whole of it, thereby revealing being itself. When the web of everyday meaning collapses and the world’s familiarity dissolves, we encounter “the moment when beings as a whole recede, and being itself comes into view.” For Heidegger, anxiety is not merely a psychological crisis but the most essential and profound encounter with the self. In its depths, we face life’s meaninglessness and, from the floor of that despair, draw up the possibility of meaning. Only then does existence slowly, silently reveal itself.
It is precisely this language and sensibility of anxiety that Ah-young Yu brings into her paintings.
Her faces belong to strangers met in passing, neighbors, family members, and images found online. Some sit, some stroll or read, others drift upon water. They are fragments of ordinary life, portraits of ordinary people—yet a peculiar tension runs through them. This is the rare “event of the gaze” that occurs between artist and subject. Yu does not aim to reproduce a specific person or situation; her figures are “images caught in the act of being seen,” reconfigured through the direction and intensity of her gaze. That gaze moves beyond simple seeing—it traces the shadow of anxiety. And through it, the indifferent everyday becomes a quiet premonition of existence.
The brown tones that dominate her canvases carry their own significance.
They are ambivalent—at once hesitant and evocative of existential awareness. Brown becomes an emotional field where forms reassemble within the neutrality of sight and judgment. Figures painted in brown refuse concrete identity, pointing to no one in particular, belonging to no fixed order of representation. They become protagonists of unfamiliar narratives and disjointed events. The shapes and contents of their lives may be unclear, yet through this “event of the gaze,” their inner modes of being slowly surface. Brown is also the material trace of time—not merely the photographic past tense of “what has been,” but the persistence of existence beyond absence or loss. This resistance to death sweeps across the canvas with the movement of the brush, bleeding softly yet inscribing with clarity. Measured by the timeline of a finite life, Yu Ah young’s “brown figures” may appear faded; in terms of existence, they are acts of creative illumination. Brown does not merely cover what has disappeared—it recalls absence into the present’s tension, awakening being even under the inevitability of death.
Form itself also unsettles the senses in her work.
Figures turned away, faces cropped from the frame—like blurred photographs—are rendered with trembling contours and textures. There is the ontological velocity one might sense in Gerhard Richter or Marlene Dumas, and the quiet contemporary emptiness of Eric Fischl. Yu invents a poetic language in glimmers of light upon water and in faces that scatter like dust, hinting at anxiety’s destructive ambiguity. The world, amid emotional debris, is caught by an ever more delicate gaze. Paint that blurs and runs loosens form, opening new thresholds of perception; rough, layered color anticipates form’s emergence from life’s complexity. In this way, Yu speaks to anxiety—crossing the surface of sensation to meet the rhythms it leaves behind. She breaks appearances, gives shape to solitude and melancholy, and confronts us with faceless faces—mirrors of our own inner life.
Anxiety is an emotion we try to avoid, yet art often begins there.
Yu Ah-young observes life within the dialectical tension where anxiety meets existence. She listens to archetypes of alienation, passion, and solitude—not to deny life, but to affirm and contemplate it. As Hannah Arendt wrote, all thinking is speaking to oneself about matters that concern oneself; true modes of being emerge only through that silent dialogue with a divided self—through solitude. Our search for meaning in an indifferent world always carries the risk of failure, yet through the philosophical strength of solitude, we find the courage to endure. It is here that Yu’s art gives birth to a new gaze—one that does not turn away from anxiety but follows its ontological depth, scattering onto the canvas the “courage to be.” Her paintings are not products of rupture, but intimate, subtle struggles to recalibrate the self and restore balance with the world.
A deep story of existence cannot be told without the fracture of anxiety.
Within that story, her anonymous portraits are no longer symbols of disappearance or reflections of strange otherness. From her earlier works—Left Behind, and Still Existing (2014), the Being series (2016), Thrown Existence (2017)—to her more recent paintings—Beyond There (2024), An Ordinary Existence (2025), Is There Anybody Out There (2025)—Ah-young Yu’s brown figures may seem excluded and left behind by all things. Yet they are “great failures” who discover solitude within anxiety and lack—beings who, dragging their imperfections, walk quietly yet steadfastly toward the unknown within themselves. These are, in truth, ourselves as Yu paints us—the honest face of existence revealed.
By Lee Jae-geol (Art Critic)