Mi Seon Yoon

Yoon Miseon (b.1979) works from the conviction that a portrait is not a record of an outward appearance but a form that emotion takes as it pushes toward the surface. Looking at portraiture from classical painting through to the present, she reads the tension held behind an expression and the density of feeling that never becomes visible, and she takes that reading as the starting point of her own work. The figures she paints are unnamed others whose bodies lose their correct shape and are broken down into lines and planes before being reassembled, in a manner where the structural dismantling of Cubism and the emotional gesture of Abstract Expressionism sit together. For her the human body is a vessel that holds feeling, so distortion is not the destruction of a form but the necessary surfacing of what has been held down. Torn divisions of line and planes of differing density register the intensity of that pressure, while the collision of unlike materials across the canvas gives each work its own rhythm. Having studied textile art and worked for several years as a designer, she came to painting through portraits pieced together from fabric, and from around 2018 drawing became the foundation of her practice as her own hand replaced the mechanical processes behind the earlier works. Built up in repeating spheres and shaded in graphite, her figures hold no fixed identity, existing at once as another person and as herself. What her work traces is the passage through which private unease is transformed, by way of someone else's form, into an image of a more universal anxiety.