Anonymous Bodies, Fragmented Time
– The Existential Landscape of Contemporary Man –
Ah-Young Yu’s paintings depict figures, yet they never quite arrive at the subject itself. Faces are emptied, gazes vanish, and bodies recede into the background. Beginning with Face to Face (2013), her figures already presuppose the impossibility of a true "encounter." Although positioned frontally, the face is erased, and identity is dismantled, existing only as a flow of paint. This is a collapse of portraiture and a painterly declaration regarding the unknowability of the modern subject.
This attitude expands dramatically in works such as An Ordinary (2015) and Existence, Fireflies. Here, figures stand within the everyday yet never truly belong to it. Faces exist only as halves or are split apart, while bodies fracture between light and matter. Through these figures, Yu does not speak of individuals. As stated in her artist note describing them as "not specific people, but forms of consciousness," she presents the figure as a psychological shell generated by the era.
At this juncture, her painting shares a subtle affinity with the deconstructive bodies of German Neo-Expressionism, particularly the works of Anselm Kiefer or Georg Baselitz. However, Yu’s figures possess a tragedy closer to the extinction of emotion and silence than to violence.
- The Post-Digital Portrait -
The core of Ah-Young Yu’s practice is the gathering of images. Rather than "direct" observation, she casts a net to capture the "language hovering in the void" and translates it into her own visual language. Her figures, sometimes derived from street photography, are the result of converting fragmented images into painting. This no longer follows the modern logic of representation—"painting what is seen." Instead, she performs a painting of a "second-order gaze," translating images back into images.
Thrown (2016) is a work that compresses this attitude to its extreme. The figure, standing before a background where hundreds of object images are piled like a wall, symbolizes a subject isolated amidst an excess of information. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of "symbolic power" is visualized here through the sheer volume of images. Humans consume images, yet simultaneously, they are dominated by them.
In Pig Earth II and Werden V (2018–2020), the artist addresses the moment figures connect with nature, but this nature is no longer pure. Beneath the figures, masses of paint pile up instead of soil; nature exists not as reality but as a mediated landscape. This scene resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of "becoming." It suggests that the human is not a fixed subject but a procedural existence that constantly changes while entangled with the other, nature, and machines.
- Existential Sensory Painting -
This period marks the greatest condensation of existential depth in Yu’s painting. In Beyond and Les Misérables (2025), figures no longer perform even social roles. A small human shape walking through a field, or a figure leaving only a head at the bottom of the canvas, represents an existence radically diminished before the world.
Particularly in Beyond, the landscape takes precedence over the figure, and the figure remains like a residue of consciousness at the edge of the world. This is a painterly translation of the solitary condition of Dasein (being-in-the-world) in Martin Heidegger’s existential philosophy. Humans are beings "thrown" into the world, and the world always looms larger than the human.
Les Misérables (2025), true to its title, deals not with the narrative tragedy of Jean Valjean but with the structural alienation of modern people. The figure standing alone under a vast sky is, before being a social underdog, an ontologically isolated human. This evokes Albert Camus’s philosophy of the absurd: the human condition of seeking meaning but ultimately failing to reach it.
- The Ethics of Materiality and "Flow" -
Yu juxtaposes oil, gouache, and water-mixable oil within a single canvas, causing materials with distinct temporalities to clash. Oil is slow and heavy, gouache is immediate, and water-mixable oil is unstable. The coexistence of these heterogeneous materials corresponds precisely to her themes. There is no stable subject; everything flows, bleeds, and erodes.
The dripping paint, erased faces, and blurred boundaries that recur in her canvas are not mere formal experiments but painterly devices revealing the uncertainty of modern memory, identity, and emotion. While this intersects with the materiality of post-Mono-ha and Western Neo-Expressionism, her painting remains unique in that it is born from the specific reality of "emotional labor" within the Korean urban landscape.
- "Psychological Critique" over Social Critique -
Ah-Young Yu’s painting distances itself from socially accusatory realism. She does not dissect the structure but gazes at the psychological position of the individual placed within it. In other words, her work is closer to "psychological critique" than "social critique." This clearly distinguishes her from the direct political nature or realism seen in Korean portraiture since the 1990s.
Her figures do not demonstrate or make gestures of resistance. Instead, they stand blankly, walk with heads bowed, and remain silent between the wind and the image. This silence is the most political point of Yu’s painting. By not speaking, she visualizes the structure of silence that modern society forces upon the individual.
- Recording the "Human, Here and Now" -
Yu draws figures, but ultimately, she is painting a self-portrait of an era where humans can no longer easily be subjects. Her figures lack names, their faces are erased, and their bodies are absorbed into the landscape. Starting from networked images, these figures are reduced back to the material of painting, oscillating endlessly between the digital and the analog.
We still possess a face. We are still face-to-face. This is a rare achievement in contemporary existential painting. While she does not directly accuse society, she is a painter who most honestly records the internal fissures of the human living today.
By Boseong Kim (Director, KimBoseong Art Center; Professor, Baekseok University)