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.
Miseon Yoon has expressed the countless emotions and sensations she has experienced in life through self-portraits created with patchwork techniques, healing inner wounds by dyeing, repeatedly cutting, and piecing together fabric. Her self-portraits, created through empathy with the many emotions others may have felt, serve as records of shared scars deeply inscribed within each individual.
Ahead of her exhibition at Noblesse Collection, we asked the artist about the background behind the creation of her works and her working methods. Noblesse Collection, located in Nature Poem in Cheongdam-dong, Seoul, will present 17 of her paintings and drawings from December 23 through January 21, 2017.
You have been creating self-portraits using the human face as your subject. Is there a particular reason for this?
Expressing the countless emotions that appear on the face gives me a great sense of satisfaction and liberation, so it became a natural choice for me.
I was struck by the phrase “self-portraits borrowed through the skin of others” in the press release for this exhibition. Why do you feel the need to borrow someone else’s appearance rather than portray yourself directly?
Although other people have lived lives different from mine, it was not difficult to find emotions in their faces that were similar to my own. Our outward appearances may differ, but feelings such as anxiety and fear are often embedded within us in similar ways, so I consider these works another form of self-portraiture.
I understand that in your early work, you focused not on ordinary situations but on victims of extreme circumstances such as war. Could you explain this in more detail?
At first, I focused on victims who had been thrown into uncontrollable situations such as war, protests, and natural disasters. I did not experience those events myself, but the fact that I remained deeply absorbed in them for such a long time makes me think that I must have empathized with the pain and fear they felt.
As I continued working by paying attention to the emotions of many different people, I naturally began to wonder whether I might be looking at them from too narrow a perspective. People who are not placed in extreme situations can also carry inner anxiety and fear that do not appear on the surface. Now, I want to move beyond specific individuals and portray the diverse self-images of those of us living in this era.
I heard that your self-portrait work is based on experiences from your past. What kinds of experiences have you focused on?
Rather than respecting me as I was, my family often tried to force me into the image of the daughter and older sister they wanted me to be. Verbal abuse and other forms of pressure when I failed to fit that mold made me feel increasingly constrained.
For example, from the time I was growing up, they compared me with others and belittled me in areas such as academic performance and appearance, while also monitoring my every move in secret. Those violent behaviors within my family remained with me as deep inner wounds. The self-loathing and anxiety I felt because I had been unable to protect myself at the time became the starting point for my self-portrait work.
Creating paintings through textile patchwork is relatively uncommon in Korea. How did you develop your current working method?
I worked extensively with thread and fabric while studying Textile Art at Hongik University, but it took time for my practice to develop into its current form. After graduating in 2005, I went through a process of trial and error, including piecing fabric together in ways similar to traditional patchwork, before arriving at my current working method around 2010. For me, fabric is both paint and canvas—a material through which I can express myself most freely, while also offering color, variety, and a sense of dimensionality.
You have been drawing since childhood. Why have you continued to pursue painting through fabric?
I had been drawing consistently since around the age of five, but fragments of unresolved pain always remained inside me. Then, through the process of creating self-portraits using the materiality of fabric, I realized that I experienced a kind of exhilaration. The process itself became a time of healing for me, and the sense of satisfaction I felt upon completing a work became the driving force that kept me moving on to the next piece.
From a distance, your works look like conventional paintings, but up close they resemble craft works painstakingly pieced together stitch by stitch. How are they made?
I think of the process as combining methods from painting and fashion. First, I make a rough sketch of the subject I want to depict. Then I dye and cut the fabric according to the character of the figure, repeatedly piecing it together through machine sewing and hand stitching. Rather than calculating the colors and forms precisely in advance, I tend to leave room for chance to emerge during the working process.
At the Noblesse Collection exhibition, you are presenting two types of work: pencil drawings and paintings made through patchwork. Is there a particular basis for dividing your practice between the two?
The drawings and the patchwork paintings are complementary to one another. Fabric works, which require many materials and a long production process, can sometimes feel restrictive. By contrast, drawing with a single pencil allows me to complete works in a short period of time. It is an excellent tool for learning interesting ways of dividing planes, and because it enables me to quickly render the images in my mind, it gives me a sense of psychological freedom.
How do you think your work has changed from your first solo exhibition 《uneasy…》 in 2012, through 《uneasy…#2》 in 2015, to the Noblesse Collection exhibition?
The colors and overall atmosphere have changed gradually, but my attempt to express a wide range of human emotions through self-portraiture has remained the same. I do not think that will change in the future either. In this exhibition, however, as the title suggests, I hope viewers will encounter the works face to face and have a range of emotions stirred within them. They do not need to feel the same emotions as the figures I have portrayed. I think it would also be meaningful if a sorrowful self-portrait could become a medium through which someone recalls a joyful memory.
