Artist Statement
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Yaewon Yun is a visual artist, based in San Francisco and currently working in Seoul South Korea, predominantly working with sculpting and painting over canvases with diverse materials. 
 
Yun’s experiments with paintings and covers a wide range from the use of molding paste, perishable materials, variety of fabrics, assemblage, painting, extended to sculpting of fabrics on canvases. Her art making process evolves around her quest in leaving physical traces of impermanence in individual identity through the means of visual representations. Yun creates paintings through a process of intimacy - translating and layering personal experiences and emotions into painterly and gestural reflections.
 
Her works are merely single oil paintings, but a mixture of bold strokes, various materials, abstractions, and spontaneous style of paintings which are in constant dispute with the conception of traditional paintings, also incorporating both dimensional depth on the canvas and viewers’ perspective. The combination of perspective and the gesticulating abstract surface focuses on Yun’s consistent personal debate on paintings; the experiment and the expansion of painting is therefore ongoing.
 
Raw energy, speed, turbulence, and something uncontrolled is saturated in the work. Her current work is influenced by both mundane and spontaneous response of existence, concerning the notion of impermanence. All things, whether material or mental, are compounded objects in a continuous change of condition, subject to decline and/or destruct. Yun works consciously with these elements and refines her work throughout practice; one might respond as ‘the spontaneity of abstraction’. She translates ‘spontaneity’ into a productive element through a sense of composition, material, color, and exploits the potential in the aesthetics. The work results in decomposed and unpredictability therefore appears in compositional balance and gestural figures. Without a specific narrative to each work, Yun has no illusions in her work. That 'it is all surface' however the constant interplay between the viewer and their perspective (or lack thereof) unquestionably adds a dimension of introspection that, for the viewer at least, implies something beyond ‘surface’ alone.
 
Through the assemblage of both new and recycled canvases, each work wears its own process-based history. Used canvas is bifurcated by a surface that speaks with the evolution of time, temporality, and movement. She uses this cycle in a routine like manner to repeat the loop of impermanence by overlapping, erasing, and recreating to emphasize this conception of none-permanence within her work. Leaving endless openings to come back and restack with layers after time and the way in which it serves viewers, into question. Her works act as a panorama of linear time; they serve as a reminder of unpredictability, incessantly accounts permanent and impermanence of life. 
 
Yun continues to develop a language to translate the fundamental impermanence of life onto a visual surface.
“Everything is interchangeable. Spontaneity and impermanence are possibilities of new.”