From Data to Particles

Since 2012, Yoon has engaged a degree of intuition in the process of copying (scanning), cropping, utilizing Photoshop tools, and taking screenshots of the material masses (comic books) page by page. Strictly speaking, subtle transformations and distortions occurred in the data images through the act of appropriating visual information. This process illustrates how, unlike the past, most people, including the artist, have come to appropriate images with personal senses and histories in works such as 《Canvases》(Hakgojae, 2020). The images we consume and produce are still valid tools for creating ideological illusions as spectacles, yet they are also consumed, volatilized, mixed, and replicated at such overwhelming speed and volume that they function as new forms of "force" moving through processes of remediation. In this respect, Yoon actively utilizes the latent potential of the image itself. The mobility of data—its inherent properties of derivation and classification through editing and transformation—permeates his work in painterly forms. Considering the scale of image dissemination and its rapid movement, one encounters the paradox wherein the artist, who identifies the focal point of these immaterial elements within fluidity, simultaneously adopts a conservative stance, preserving these images neutrally on painterly materials and frames. Through this, images are no longer confined to specific symbols but are reinterpreted as dispersed mediators, acquiring the flexibility to be newly read according to the stories they convey to each viewer.

The pixel, the smallest controllable unit Yoon employs, represents the raw virtual matter for vector processing. The Screenshot(2017–2018) Series materialized virtual pixels onto the canvas by layering extremely lightweight airbrush particles sprayed into the air, evenly distributed across the surface. Extending from this screenshot logic, his recent works such as 〈Drive to the Moon and Galaxy〉(2022) and 〈Tagging–H〉(2022) deliberately disrupt pixel images, transposing them onto surfaces that serve as the background of the canvas. Unlike thick brushstrokes, the layered particles settle seamlessly, making it impossible to gauge surface depth, whether thin or thick in specific areas. Meanwhile, the vacant areas are filled with calculated small brushstrokes and oil sticks, revealing imagined images. Fundamentally, digital images composed of pixels are inherently fragmented. Such fragmented images, through the intervention of Photoshop tools during editing and saving stages, acquire new layers that alter their resolution, functioning as additional references mediated by the artist.

These recent developments mark the formation of new loops, resembling the fusion of sensory and conceptual information, akin to the mechanisms of connection and linkage generated by the gestures of drawing, closely aligned with the artist's bodily movements. The Screenshot and Blasted (Land) Scape Series have taken various forms, including rugs, moving images, lightboxes, and silk screens. By arbitrarily increasing their resolution, these formats renew the process of distorting and abstracting the surface barriers. Consequently, the presence of the image coexists across originals, reproductions, and post-processed results, where the meticulously layered particles of time remain as "visual tactility," enabling viewers to infer disparate sensory experiences.

Standardization and Frame

Yoon's interest in standard formats originates from book layouts, paper proportions, and sizes, which form the basis for repetition, appropriation, and gradual expansion in his structural frameworks. Works such as the seven-piece 〈ASPKG〉(2018) and the three-piece 〈Tagging–C3, C2, C1〉(2022) function as individual objects under basic units, wherein their three-dimensional implementations elicit an optical illusion that anchors them as objectified centers. However, some works that depart from flatness assert a contrasting strategy—not prioritizing the stable sensibility of objects, but rather accentuating the emptiness of the data-edited surface and its depth.

The particles endlessly expelled onto the surface by the artist continually transform through formats such as printing, spraying, overpainting, sprinkling, and even real-time data collection and transmission. In particular, his recent solo exhibition 《Tagging》(Cylinder/Hall 1, 2022) reinterprets the architectural form, size, and structure of space as another surface, resulting in effects that perceive meanings generated from the front, back, interior, exterior, and sides as layered, intertwined surface images. Especially, his recent large-scale works necessitate direct bodily engagement to concretize the act of seeing and sensing images. Yoon projects a sequence of "particle" images onto space conceived as a canvas. When public spaces are imbued with meaning, previously distanced, dry sensibilities shift toward spontaneous, reciprocal moments, confirming a transition.
The method of gradually enlarging standardized formats according to proportional sequences began with 〈GE91–3〉(2014), the origin of the 《Blasted (Land) Scape》(Arko Art Center, 2014), and reappeared in floor-installed painting fragments at the 2018 Gwangju Biennale. His skepticism toward Korea’s characteristic "ho" canvas units and paper format standards leads us to considerations of relative perception concerning depth and image generated by producing volume on flat planes. Considering the autonomy of cropping and screenshotting data images in any manner, one encounters the paradoxical moment when adding thickness to structurally flat surfaces during their transformation into sculptural elements paradoxically accentuates abstraction.

Essentially, Yoon’s methods of perceiving images and the technologies disseminating and displaying images in this era culminate in contemplations on standardization inevitably following contemporary images. It is a natural course for the same context to be reflected in today's painting methodologies. Simultaneously, it suggests that the era, in which most people experience and produce images through similar frameworks and devices, inevitably connects mass-produced standard sizes to images and contemporary painting.

In this way, Yoon has explored contemporary painting by centering on the roles of surfaces, particles, and standards—the basic units. Although not immediately visible, the labor-intensive process of collecting and editing data images unfolds across multiple layers, wherein the artist's unique classification system is determined. These sources remain faithful to basic materials such as canvas and paint, yet the artist selects drawing methods suited to implementing partitioned and calculated surfaces using editing tools. If the term "drawing" seems inadequate here, one could describe these gestures of painting as printing, spraying, brushing, or squeezing. Over the ten years since 2012, the most significant material change in Yoon’s practice would be the fine particles atop the canvas.

Considering that these particles—the minute grains constituting matter—exist devoid of size but possessing dynamic properties such as mass, position, and speed, akin to locating a single point in space, his skepticism toward standardization unfolds into serial works of scale. In recent works, where particles blend comprehensively from distinct forms, the artist evidences an increased openness toward the accidents and errors inherent to painting—elements he had previously avoided.

Thus, Yoon’s approach of mapping scattered and gathered data images onto paintings constitutes a conscious process of realizing format shifts in images. Furthermore, he attempts a radical transition toward data-driven painting that, departing from object-based aesthetics, presupposes the emergence of new surfaces and forms within image clusters.

References

• [비평] 이미지 매핑: 표면, 입자, 규격의 포맷
  [Critique] Image Mapping: The Format of Surface, Particle, and Standardization