Since the fall of 2013, I have been developing a series of paintings centered on the human figure. This body of work is titled The Brown Figures Series. While the paintings depict human forms, they are not portraits of specific individuals. Rather, they are closer to visualizations—shaped through the act of painting—of internal forms arising from my own consciousness.
Modern individuals live both separately and together, like figures in a plaza where public and private spheres constantly intersect and conflict. We exist as individuals, yet always in relation to the collective. Each work in the series begins with my act of walking through the city and observing people. I photograph scenes in which bystanders gaze at street spectacles, and I also capture what they are looking at. These images are then either digitally manipulated or printed directly before being transformed into paintings. I focus on passersby precisely because they are unaware of being photographed. This lack of self-consciousness reveals a bodily language—composed of gestures and movements—that is specific to the present moment and a particular place. I see this as a way of collecting and archiving the contemporary physical vocabulary of everyday life. On the other hand, I intentionally avoid using personal images. This is because I aim to create essential images that express collective emotions of our time, rather than become immersed in individual sentiment. Maintaining distance allows me to engage with the work from a more objective standpoint.
At the same time, The Brown Figures Series also relies on anonymous images of people found online. These fragmented digital traces have become deeply intertwined with contemporary life, as our lived experience increasingly expands into digital realms—spaces without physical location. For me, these images—flooding the network like a new kind of plaza filled with spectacles—remain psychologically distant. That distance, however, provides a certain freedom. It enables me to escape the social constraints shaped by my own personal history and to encounter the image as a more open, unbounded space of thought and expression.
In working with these digital fragments, I often extract the figure from the photo, remove the background, enlarge the face, and focus on the nuance of the pose. I then reintroduce a sense of uncertainty through the suggestion of space or atmosphere. I selectively amplify or reduce elements of the image depending on the psychological context I wish to convey. Though the resulting works are figurative, I approach them as if they were landscapes—gazing upon them from a distance. I aim to capture fleeting, unstable moments through dripping paint, rough brushstrokes, and spontaneous gestures.
The Brown Figures Series addresses themes of anxiety and solitude in modern life through representations of the human figure. However, unlike many figurative painters, my work does not aim to raise or analyze regional or overtly sociopolitical issues. Rather than focusing on structural narratives within society, I seek to reflect the psychological condition of the ordinary person—someone who must confront the realities of the here and now. Through this series, I aim to visualize the emotional and psychological atmosphere shaped by the intersecting temporalities and spaces of digital and analog life. I hope to speak to the tangible sense of “now-here”—the immediate, lived experience of our present moment.
Yu Ah-Young, June 2025