Mi Seon Yoon

Yoon Miseon (b.1979) has built a body of portrait work completed in the form of repetitive spheres. After majoring in textile art at Hongik University, she worked as a designer for several years, and the portrait came to sit at the center of her practice from the moment she decided to hang a shape pieced together from small fabric scraps on the wall. In these early portraits made of cloth, a figure strikingly resembling the artist herself appeared again and again, as if she had unconsciously recognized and expressed the place where her identity belonged. Around 2018 her practice underwent a decisive shift. The mechanical devices that had joined fragmented scraps of fabric were set aside, and in their place came her own hands holding pencils and brushes, so that drawing became the foundational and primary method of her work. The same year saw the emergence of the Double Portrait, a form in which two faces overlap and coexist, and the portraits that followed carry multiple emotions within a single self-image. Each title combines the year of production with the sequence in which the work was completed that year, forming a serial number unique to the piece. Built up in graphite, the surfaces of these spheres lend the figures an emotional depth. Because the work begins in an obsessive experience of life, it takes on the meaning of an act of resolution, and Yoon Miseon's portraits become singular focal points where emotional darkness is revealed in its raw, unsoftened form.