Soo Yun
Artist Statement
My work explores the point where existential anxiety meets the wonder of a resilient childhood mind. Raising a child as a stranger in a foreign land brought back a memory from age four, when I was lost and separated from my mother. The dream that followed for years afterward — searching for mom, searching for home — remains, paradoxically, a vivid adventure. On the canvas, I return to the mindset of a child my daughter’s age, touching again those volatile, fragile feelings. The canvas is where that feeling becomes matter. Thick layers of oil paint, cut through with sharp scratches, mark the friction of fear meeting a surface. What shows through the scratches — the color underneath — testifies to what remains after the storm passes. The figures keep tripping and falling, keep threatening to break, but on this surface I learn to fall without breaking. The canvas becomes, then, the record of an adventure that continues even inside the storm.
My paintings begin in the body — in a four-year-old girl's panic when she lost sight of her mother in a crowd. That moment never resolved. It became a recurring dream: searching for home, wandering through familiar-yet-unreachable places, moving through corridors of memory with childhood friends. The search never ends. The anxiety never quiets. I am a Korean immigrant raising a daughter in America. My body has changed. The coordinates of belonging have shifted. The anxiety I carried as a child has grown larger in displacement — more formless, more relentless — and painting has become the only language adequate to it.
Material practice
I work with oil paint applied in extreme impasto — thick, overflowing, scraped and re-layered until the surface becomes a physical record of time and psychic pressure. The paint does not illustrate feeling; it is feeling made material. Layers are built up and then dragged through vertically with tools and fingers, exposing the strata beneath — colors that contradict, histories that collide.
This vertical gesture — the hysteric scratch, the anxious mark — is the formal center of my work. What is revealed beneath the surface is not resolution but complexity: another layer, another self, another fear not yet named.
The luminous, saturated colors I choose belong to a girl's world — vibrant, pure, undefended. But the surface those colors inhabit is violent, scarred, and dense. This tension is not decorative. It is the condition I live in: softness surviving inside turbulence.
Subject and Symbol
My recurring figures are a girl falling through waterfalls and storms, a house glimpsed but never reached, objects suspended mid-flight. These are not metaphors I constructed — they are images my sleeping mind returns to, night after night. I paint dreams because dreams are where my anxiety lives most honestly.
The house is memory and the body. The storm is time, immigration, motherhood, loss. The falling girl is not passive — she is searching even as she falls, oriented toward something she cannot yet see. Identity, in my work, is not found. It is the falling itself.
Between Painting and Sculpture
My canvases refuse to remain flat. The accumulated paint — sometimes centimeters thick — creates topography: ridges, valleys, ruptures. The work exists in three dimensions not as a conceptual strategy but as an honest consequence of process. To paint anxiety is to build it up until it has weight, until it casts shadow.
I am drawn to the boundary between painting and sculpture because anxiety itself lives on boundaries — between self and world, past and present, belonging and exile. My work does not resolve that boundary. It inhabits it.