Installation View (1)

We are inundated with images every day—on the news, in advertisements, across social media, films, and dramas. These selectively edited, idealized scenes arrest our gaze and saturate our inner sensibilities. Real sensations begin to fade. The Brown Figures Series (2013–2025) by U Ahyoung is a painterly endeavor to reclaim that vanishing sense of the real.

WERDEN VIII – The Midday Player 1-6, 2025, 145.4 x 181.8 cm, Oil, gouache and water-based oil on six canvases

Since 2013, the artist has collected anonymous figures from urban streets and online sources. Stripped of contextual backgrounds, only fleeting gestures and subtle expressions remain—rendered on canvas. These nameless and emotionally neutral figures allow the artist freedom: the freedom to create without narrative attachment, to paint without emotional projection. What emerges is painting as release—liberated from biography, yet filled with presence.

Installation View (2)

Each work unfolds within a tension between compositional intent and the physicality of materials. The vitality of captured movement is expressed through raw brushstrokes and fluid pigments, while muted tones and intentional drips evoke emotional undercurrents. Though seemingly still, the images pulse with rhythm and quiet intensity.

WERDEN IX – Just one life to live, 2025, 130.3x194cm, Oil, gouache and water-based oil on canvas

Color deepens the viewer’s immersion. Transparent washes open visual depth and extend emotional space, while the contrast between warm browns and cool blues and greens heightens subtle emotional vibrations. Free from strict representation, the surface gently shimmers in meditative stillness.

거기 누구 없소, 2025, 162×130.3cm, Oil, gouache and water-based oil on canvas

Developed between 2013 and 2025, this series represents the artist’s sustained effort to contemplate and reconfigure contemporary sensibilities through painting—an age-old medium she has persistently explored on her own terms. Rather than narrating specific events, U Ahyoung records the presence of anonymous figures to articulate the fragile boundary between image and reality. Her work captures the psychological instability of modern life and traces an experimental trajectory shaped by impressions she has absorbed from the world around her.

In these works, the gazes, gestures, and silhouettes of unidentified figures carry an uncanny familiarity. As viewers project their own memories and emotions onto these silent presences, something intimate and unnamed quietly surfaces. These open-ended spaces invite us to revisit forgotten sensations and gently inhabit the subtle traces of our interior worlds.

Gallery We
We, 25-17, Hosu-ro 52beon-gil, Suji-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea
031 266 3266

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