Yunghun Yoo

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

In October 2023, I visited the Louvre and spent the day looking closely at paintings of non-Asian people. Later, riding the subway, I began to see the passengers around me as if they had stepped out of those paintings—figures from another time suddenly moving through the present, wearing contemporary clothes. I realized that I had never quite looked at Asian faces in the same way, and began wondering why. My paintings emerge from this question, not as an inquiry into how Asians and non-Asians look different, but into how differently they have been looked at and represented. I am interested in the histories that shape our experience of an individual face, and in what it means to paint an Asian face within a different history of looking. This has led me toward scenes of transit—trains, stations, tunnels, streets, and other spaces where bodies gather and move. These places become both a physical and psychological reference point: a place of departure and arrival, solitude and sociality, stasis and motion. The train also carries histories of migration, labor, expansion, exclusion, and displacement. Within these spaces, I ask what happens when an Asian face is encountered not simply as a portrait, but within a particular landscape, infrastructure, or moment. Does context alter how we see the individual? Photography further complicates these questions through its ability to reproduce and circulate faces, but my interest remains rooted in painting. I am interested in what...

Artwork