Miseon Yoon studied Ceramic Art at Dankook University and Textile Art at Hongik University. Through graphite drawing, she explores anxiety and fear within the human psyche, visualizing them through organic spherical forms she calls “Balance Balls.”
Miseon Yoon has held solo exhibitions at Gallery Dam in 2012, Noblesse Collection in 2017, GALLERY KABINETT in 2022 and 2025, PAGEROOM8 in 2025, and KICHE in 2026.
Miseon Yoon has participated in group exhibitions at Maison Ozmen in Paris and GALLERY KABINETT in Seoul in 2023, ART SPACE HOHWA in 2024, and PAGEROOM8 and JIWOOHEON in 2026.
Miseon Yoon’s practice begins with emotions that resist easy resolution—anxiety, fear, and psychological wounds—which she projects onto the human face and body. In her early fabric portraits, she identified with the faces of people caught in extreme circumstances such as war, protests, and natural disasters, describing these works as “self-portraits borrowed through the skin of others.”
By recognizing emotions in others that resonated with her own, she used portraiture as a means of reflecting inward through empathy. Over time, this concern expanded beyond specific victims toward a broader image of contemporary individuals carrying forms of anxiety and fear that remain invisible on the surface.
After her fabric practice, the face gradually moved away from the representation of actual individuals and developed into an autonomous figure capable of standing in for the artist’s interior self. The bob-haired figure known as “Bob” became an alter ego and recurring persona through which Yoon repeatedly reconfigured her own identity.
The earlier principle of assembling fragmented pieces into a face evolved into combinations of circles and spheres, while the “ball” came to embody the search for equilibrium and the desire of a fragmented self to move toward wholeness. Since 《Balance Ball》 in 2022, this motif has become an increasingly concentrated expression of her long-standing concerns with anxiety, endurance, and psychological recovery.
Figures such as the ‘Devil,’ the ‘Victim,’ and the black clown further expand her inner world into relationships structured by good and evil, aggression and vulnerability, desire and repression. In 《SOMNICUS》, the circus functions as a metaphor for life in which dream and reality, tension and play, continually intersect.
The black clown, struggling to maintain balance amid the expectations of an audience, embodies human vulnerability, solitude, and the will to endure. Through alter egos and fictional figures, Yoon shifts personal experience into a broader psychological narrative, exploring how a person continues to persist and grow within conditions of instability.
In her recent work, the relationship between self and other again becomes increasingly central. The double portraits and tears in 《Circular Portrait》 suggest identities and emotions that overlap and change rather than remain fixed, while 《Ball and Water Mold》 redirects her gaze toward anonymous individuals glimpsed on the street, through car windows, or in mediated images.
Here, the “ball” expands into a form that can be simultaneously closed and open, full and empty, while “water mold” and the idea of staining evoke emotions that seep into others, alter them, corrode, and eventually disappear. Identity in Yoon’s practice thus emerges as an emotional self continually transformed and reconstructed through contact with others.
Miseon Yoon’s early practice began with patchwork portraits that treated fabric as a painterly material. After roughly sketching a figure, she dyed and irregularly cut pieces of fabric, repeatedly joining them through machine sewing and hand stitching, while at times applying heat and ironing the surface taut.
As Yoon described fabric as both “paint and canvas,” color, form, texture, and volume operated simultaneously, while chance arising during the working process was embraced rather than eliminated through predetermined composition. The fragmented faces and bodies thus retain traces of cutting and joining, bringing emotional expression and the artist’s physical labor together within the structure of the image.
Around 2017, as the primary medium shifted from fabric to pencil drawing, the construction of the image also changed. Replacing the industrial sewing machine and iron with a pencil, Yoon began dismantling and reconstructing faces through fluid graphite lines.
Simplified geometric forms—triangles, cones, circles, and spheres—came to define the head and facial features, while the earlier principle of assembling pieces of fabric continued through the connection of lines and planes. Although the medium changed substantially, the underlying method of building a figure from fragments remained continuous throughout her practice.
Circles and spheres subsequently became the most distinctive structural units of Yoon’s portraiture. Circular forms of varying sizes connect like joints to construct faces and bodies, while repeated layers of graphite create tonal differences that produce illusions of protrusion and recession on a flat surface.
Detailed gradations of black and gray are juxtaposed with restricted areas of color and monochromatic backgrounds, emphasizing both volume and flatness. Reversal, repetition, and transformation also become central compositional strategies, as seen in mirrored figures and double portraits in which two faces overlap.
These formal devices allow recurring figures such as “Bob” to continually alter their expressions and gazes while extending the practice from self-portraiture and double portraits to group figures and still lifes.
In her recent paintings, these formal principles have expanded toward a stronger emphasis on materiality. Working on canvas with acrylic, pencil, charcoal, oil stick, and oil pastel, Yoon transforms the “ball” from a line-defined geometric unit into a material form built through brushwork, texture, and accumulated marks.
Faces and complex expressions of strangers glimpsed through car windows, on the street, or in mediated images are transferred onto the surface through bodily movements that roll, scatter, and disrupt the lines. Processes such as staining, together with “water mold” that physically appeared during the mixing of water-based acrylics, have also entered her visual vocabulary.
The dyeing and stitching of the early fabric works, the repetitive lines of her graphite drawings, and the spreading and layering of her recent paintings thus remain connected by a shared method of accumulation, joining, and responsiveness to unexpected material transformation.
Miseon Yoon’s practice has developed across fabric, drawing, and painting while maintaining portraiture and self-portraiture as its central concerns. The cutting and joining of fabric fragments in her early works evolved into structures of connected circles and spheres in pencil drawings, and more recently into paintings where multiple materials and gestures collide and overlap.
Rather than abandoning earlier methods as her media changed, Yoon has repeatedly reconfigured the same underlying logic of fragmentation, connection, and reconstruction. She has described patchwork and drawing as complementary practices, while emphasizing that her sustained interest in expressing diverse human emotions through self-portraiture has remained consistent despite changes in color and atmosphere.
This continuity becomes particularly visible in the ‘Circular Portrait’ works developed from around 2018 onward. More than 500 circular portraits produced over approximately seven years form an extended investigation in which circles and spheres serve as recurring units for continually transforming the face and body.
The numbering of works records their year and sequence of production, while variations of “Bob,” mirrored faces, double portraits, group figures, and still lifes accumulate traces of different moments and emotional states. Repetition therefore functions less as a fixed formula than as a method for testing how a consistent visual language can generate continually shifting psychological and figurative possibilities.
《Balance Ball》 in 2022, Yoon’s first exhibition after a five-year hiatus, marked a significant consolidation of this visual language. The sphere, recurring across ‘Bob,’ ‘Devil,’ and the ‘Plants’ series, expanded from a compositional device into a motif embodying the artist’s inner state and attitude toward life.
In 《SOMNICUS》 in 2025, “Bob” was transformed into a black clown within a fictional narrative of dreams and the circus, while 《Circular Portrait》 later that year revisited the long-term evolution of her circular forms and made their chronology more explicit. Throughout these developments, familiar faces continue to recur while their roles, relationships, and emotional registers steadily expand.
Her 2026 exhibition 《Ball and Water Mold》 demonstrates that this language remains in motion, redirecting attention toward the faces of others while intensifying the material qualities of painting. Staining in fabric, circularity in drawing, and the ball and water mold in recent painting belong to different phases of the practice, yet they share recurring ideas of contact, penetration, fragmentation, combination, and circulation.
Yoon thus sustains her practice through repeated transformation rather than through the stabilization of a fixed style. Beginning with personal memory and self-portraiture, her imagery has expanded through personas, anonymous faces, still lifes, and groups of figures, suggesting an ongoing framework through which the relationship between self and other can continue to evolve.
The approximately twenty works presented in Miseon Yoon’s 《Circular Portrait》 may, I would venture to say, serve as important markers for understanding both the artist and her practice. Each work is assigned a unique serial number consisting of the year and the order in which it was completed during that year.
Following the numbers assigned by the artist in descending order reveals several recurring characteristics: portraits and still lifes composed of circular and spherical forms, different background colors for each work, pencil drawing, and the repeated appearance of particular subjects. At the end of this descending sequence is Self-Portrait #8 (2016), a self-portrait made primarily with fabric rather than paper.
Among the artist’s textile portraits, figures resembling the artist herself appeared with particular frequency. These densely constructed portraits, made by irregularly cutting cotton fabric, joining pieces stained with paint, and heat-treating their seams, vividly reflect the artist’s circumstances at the time. After majoring in Textile Art, Miseon Yoon worked as a designer for several years.
She has recalled a moment when she suddenly felt compelled to hang on the wall a form assembled from small fragments of fabric. I wonder whether that moment was precisely when she unconsciously recognized and expressed the place where her own identity could reside.
This Work, p24-14
In 2018, the “double portrait,” in which two faces overlap and coexist within a single form, began to appear. p18-4 can be seen as a precursor to the 2024 double portrait p24-14, as well as the starting point of a self-portrait practice encompassing multiple emotions. In place of the mechanical devices once used to join fragmented pieces of fabric, the artist’s hand, now holding a pencil and brush, took over, marking a major shift toward the direct intervention of bodily action in her practice.
From around 2018 onward, drawing became both the foundation and the primary method of her portrait practice, providing a more immediate means of artistic expression than before. At the same time, however, portraits constructed from basic geometric forms such as circles and spheres paradoxically appear to conceal emotion and artistic intention.
Soon, however, the artist began projecting herself onto a bob-haired figure, which emerged as an indispensable presence in both her exhibitions and her practice, gradually forming its own chronology. Composed of circles and curves of varying sizes, the figures in these works already exist as complete presences within the drawing process itself, as the artist’s hand continuously rolls and extends lines in a circular motion without interruption.
In p24-14, the two faces, suggestive of the figure’s dual nature, coexist in an intermingled form, while the multitude of lines carrying the potential to move in any direction evokes processes of transformation and replication.
Miseon Yoon’s work may call to mind early twentieth-century Cubism. Yet it is difficult to interpret her practice simply by applying the framework of a particular art-historical movement, because the circumstances through which her mode of expression became established are deeply autobiographical.
In order to relieve herself of the physical and psychological weight inherent in the materials, methods, and processes of working with fabric, she chose to let go of that approach despite its having been one of her strongest methods and talents. The small puzzle-like fragments of cloth were simplified into circular forms, while the patchwork that had once joined them evolved into distinctive figures in which circles connect like joints.
In particular, as seen in the background colors determined only after the subject has been drawn, the mirror-like figures facing one another in left-right reversal, and the gazes and expressions that gradually emerge through the accumulation of graphite within circles and the self-proliferation of spherical forms, the changes visible throughout the chronology of the bob-haired figures reveal the addition of a more playful dimension to the artist’s process.
In her most recently completed work, p25-35, tears seem to confess that the circular portrait is no longer a fixed image preserved in the past. The dramatically falling teardrops, themselves circular forms within the circular portrait, anticipate a further exploration of intimate psychological states and emotional trajectories.
One can also imagine that the chronology of the bob-haired figure, identified with Miseon Yoon’s self-portrait, will not merely continue through variations of the same image, but may undergo bold transformations through still lifes, groups of figures, and other forms of portraiture. This will not culminate in a single definitive form of the circular portrait; rather, it will ultimately become a record of countless portraits and another pathway through which self-consciousness unfolds.
