Yoon Songah
- Introduction of Artist
- Yoon SongAh is an artist who portrays the sense of alienation experienced by the individual within society. She made her debut in 2023 at the ASYAAF (Asian Students and Young Artists Art Festival), where she quickly drew critical attention. Having spent her childhood abroad due to her parents’ overseas postings, she was exposed to diverse cultural environments. In particular, her encounter with gongbi painting in China awakened her to the allure of East Asian painting, which she later went on to study in earnest.
Yoon’s paintings originate from vivid dreams she once had. In one such dream, all human figures had vanished, leaving streets filled only with thickets in the shape of human bodies. The solitude and unease she felt in this striking vision became a central motif in her work. Her compositions often feature dense forests of towering trees alongside a solitary boy. In this context, the boy symbolizes an individual unable to assimilate into society, while the trees represent the collective or the social body. The ‘eyes’ painted on the tree trunks signify the gaze through which society observes, judges, and appraises the other. These eyes may fixate on the boy, turn away in indifference, or even convey hostilityvisual metaphors for the mechanisms of surveillance, control, and attention imposed by society.
The boy wanders among the trees, sometimes reclining on a stump to rest, sometimes meeting the eyes directly, and at other times turning his back to walk away. Yet he continues to circle through the forest, seeking to become one of them. This constant negotiation between the entirely different entities of tree and human becomes a self-portrait of those unable to integrate fully into the social fabric, reflecting the growing pains that arise in the process of becoming a social being. The boy’s alienation is far from an unfamiliar sentiment. Society may take the form of family in early life, school during adolescence, and myriad groups encountered in adulthood. Beginning with the imbalance of power between the vast collective of trees and a lone human, the narrativerooted in Yoon’s own imagination and lived experienceexpands into a commentary on the pervasive reality of alienation in contemporary life. The stars, pouring down like a light of hope in her paintings, symbolize the innocence and freedom from external judgment that marked her own childhood.
Positioned at the intersection of the East Asian tradition of sansuhwa (landscape painting) and Western humanism, Yoon creates a distinctive world where vast forests and small human figures coexist. In sansuhwa, nature is the central subjectan immense presence into which humans retreat or with which they seek unityyet the focus remains on the landscape itself rather than the human figure. Yoon’s work, however, places the small boy’s dreams and desires at the center of the narrative, embodying a humanistic worldview more aligned with Western traditions. Against the backdrop of East Asian painting, rendered on jangji with mineral pigments, her human-centered storytelling dismantles the boundaries between East and West, shaping a realm entirely her own.
As an artist committed to steady growth, Yoon SongAh will continue to depict, with nuance and sensitivity, emotions too complex to be easily expressed in words, and the journeys of those striving to grow and belong within the social worlds they inhabit.
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