YOU Hyeonkyeong

Self-Portrait 2014-16, Oil on linen, 66x57cm, 2014

24 December 2023, Oil on canvas, 142x123cm, 2023

YOU Hyeonkyeong’s paintings do not seek to explain suffering or convert it into a narrative of overcoming. Her work begins from the possibility that pain, as it passes through the body, accumulates as sensation and can reach others like a kind of “scent” Pain is not something to be eliminated, it is stored in the body as a way of understanding life and the world, and through painting it extends outward.

Driving to Göreme, Oil on canvas, 136x173cm, 2023

This exhibition does not call upon the story of a specific individual. Instead, it focuses on the “place” one comes to inhabit in the course of a life. It is a position that supports the center of living, yet one that no one can ever fully occupy from within a point where emotion, responsibility, and distance intersect. Through portraits and landscapes, the artist has consistently recorded not likeness or representation, but the tension, impulse, and density of relationships produced by the mere fact of another’s presence.

A Wilderness 1, Oil on canvas, 98×166.5cm, 2024

The traces of brushstrokes left after the figure has disappeared, and landscapes that refuse to reproduce a specific site, are not failures. They are events that reveal the pressures exerted on the body and the density of time. The empty spaces within the canvas are likewise not voids, but breathing room spaces that prevent emotion from collapsing into destruction.

The Crimsoned Mountain, Oil on canvas, 115x89cm, 2024

Rather than speaking of healing, the exhibition Where Mother Stands asks what it means to endure pain while holding one’s gaze upon the place where one stands.

Gallery Imazoo
Seoul, Gangnam-gu, Teheran-ro 20-gil,12, B1
+82 02 557 1950

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