Conveying an Era Through the Memory of the Body
Ah-young Yu is an artist who most quietly yet profoundly demonstrates how contemporary Korean painting is returning to the themes of the “human” and the “body.” In an age dominated by rapidly consumed images and instantaneous messages, her paintings reject speed and instead choose depth—of sensation, of time, and of presence. Rather than foregrounding specific events or narratives, Yu’s work invites us to contemplate the very condition of human existence within the world. This, at its core, is the essence of her practice.
Yu has long used painting as a means of preserving the body’s memory and the inner landscape of human experience. She works with everyday scenes and anonymous figures, layering emotional states, temporal residue, and memory across the surface of the canvas. Her subjects are not meant to represent particular individuals. Bodies floating on the sea, a figure walking through a field, a bent posture at the water’s edge—each person is someone, yet simultaneously all of us. Through this anonymity, her paintings transcend portraiture and capture the shared emotional and existential condition of contemporary humanity.
— A Painting of Affect —
In Yu’s works, the human body is not merely an object placed within a landscape; it becomes the sensory core that merges with and permeates its surroundings. The ocean is not a backdrop but another kind of flesh that lifts and sways the body. The fields and sky operate as fields of affect intricately intertwined with the figure’s inner emotional state. The layered browns, blues, and flesh tones in her palette are less representations of light than accumulations of time itself.
Paint is applied thinly or thickly, absorbed or scraped, and through its blurs, scratches, and overpainting, a body takes shape. This body privileges sensory presence over anatomical accuracy. Her figures do not stride forward with heroic purpose, nor do they occupy scenes of dramatic action. They simply walk, float, gaze, and exist. And in this state where “nothing seems to happen,” Yu’s paintings reveal the most essential tremors of human existence.
— Lineages in Contemporary Art History —
Yu’s work belongs, broadly speaking, to contemporary figurative painting, yet it maintains a critical distance from traditional realism. Her practice resonates with the trajectory of 20th-century Expressionism, where the body became a vessel for emotion, psychology, and existential anxiety. It also reflects the emotional depth associated with German contemporary painting and the material sensitivity to color characteristic of French painting—elements that converge with a distinctly Korean sensibility in her work.
Her canvases also embody a key tendency in contemporary painting: the collision and coexistence of photographic representation and abstraction. Forms are clearly present, yet always on the verge of dissolving into paint and gesture. This unstable threshold is precisely where the contemporaneity of her painting emerges.
— “Slow Painting” and Being —
As contemporary art increasingly gravitates toward concepts, systems, and technology, Yu’s paintings recover the ethics of “seeing itself.” They prompt viewers to linger—not to interpret immediately, but to follow the movement of color, texture, bodily posture, and the breath of the composition. This is one of the important achievements of what is now being reconsidered as slow painting.
Aesthetically speaking, the figures in Yu’s work function not as objects to be depicted, but as bodies in direct contact with the world. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s “ontology of flesh,” her figures traverse the boundary between subject and object, touching the world and being touched by it. The body entrusted to the sea is not a subject observing nature, but a sensory presence immersed within it. At this juncture, Yu’s painting proposes a contemporary ontology in which the human and the world intermingle, quietly moving beyond anthropocentric vision.
— A Place in Contemporary Korean Art —
In a time when rapid production and rapid consumption threaten to define the value of art itself, Yu’s practice prompts reflection through the oldest artistic virtues—slowness, maturation, and accumulation. She avoids excessive symbolization and over-conceptualization. Instead, she pursues painting’s fundamental forces: the relationship between paint and body, sensation and time.
Through this, Yu forms a crucial axis within contemporary Korean painting—one of affective painting, one of ontological figuration. Her works are not dazzling, but they endure; not forceful, but profoundly resonant. And in that very quality lies one of the most significant pathways through which Korean painting may reconnect with the world today.
Yu’s paintings do not loudly denounce the noise of the era. Rather, they show—quietly and steadily—how a human body lives, quivers, and persists within nature, time, and memory. Her figures do not speak, yet in their silence dwell the solitude and anxiety contemporary humans must bear, as well as the subtle hope that sustains life nevertheless. And like her paintings themselves, this resonance enters slowly, deeply, into the inner space of the viewer.
By Boseong Kim (Director, KimBoseong Art Center; Professor, Baekseok University)