Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Hyunmo Yang has held solo exhibitions including 《Whispering Currents》(Roy Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Burning symmetry》 (Roy Gallery, Seoul, 2023), and 《Black Coloured Light》 (Show and Tell, Seoul, 2019).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Yang has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Transurfing》 (Noblesse Collection, Seoul, 2025), 《Peephole》 (ARC1, Seoul, 2024), 《Exhibition \ Publication》 (WESS, Seoul, 2022), 《No place like home》 (Artspace 0, Seoul, 2021), 《Support SARUBIA 2020》(Project Space Sarubia, Seoul, 2020), and more. 

Awards (Selected)

In 2024, Yang was selected for ‘New Abstract Art’ curated by Artsy, and in 2025 was named among ‘136 Abstract Artists Selected by 80 Art Professionals’ in Art in Culture (May issue).

Originality & Identity

Hyunmo Yang’s practice begins with unstable forms found in the external world. The artist discovers clues for his work in the sky outside his window, distant urban landscapes, and flickering objects such as candle flames. These subjects possess paradoxical qualities: they constantly change while simultaneously maintaining a center. Precarious Fire(2024) directly demonstrates this concern, pictorially rendering a state that wavers as if about to extinguish, yet does not lose its core.
 
In his first solo exhibition, 《Black Coloured Light》(Show and Tell, 2019), he explored “darkness that does not disappear into light” within the excessive brightness of Seoul. Here, darkness is not treated as mere visual absence but as a perceptual condition that recedes the moment it begins to appear. Moving beyond the binary structure of light and darkness, he proposes a paradoxical logic: by making something visible, one reveals what remains unseen.
 
Later, in 《Burning symmetry》(Roy Gallery, 2023), Yang investigates the relationship between blurriness and solidity through symmetry. Symmetry is interpreted not as simple repetition, but as a process of finding a center within unstable forms. The 'Shield'(2023) series foregrounds solidity, the 'Soft Squares'(2023) series questions that solidity, and the 'Burning Symmetry'(2023) series blurs the image once again. What matters here is not form itself, but the process through which balance is constructed and dismantled.
 
In his recent solo exhibition 《Whispering Currents》(Roy Gallery, 2025), exterior landscapes overlap more directly with inner states. The sky outside the window becomes intertwined with the artist’s emotions, memories, and projections of future time. At this stage, the act of observing the world coincides with self-reflection, and sensory experience expands into ontological inquiry.

Style & Contents

Although Yang works with the traditional medium of oil painting, his surfaces move between figuration and abstraction. In 《Black Coloured Light》, he placed his paintings within a deep gray space, positioning painting not as a medium that represents light, but as a device that enables darkness to be seen. The gradual emergence of forms through subtle tonal differences calls into question the very conditions of seeing that painting performs.
 
In 《Burning symmetry》, symmetry appears as a primary compositional unit. Shield No.8(2023) constructs a solid image through clearly defined lines and planes, while Soft Squares(2023) evokes a flattened, tactile sensibility. In Burning Symmetry No.28(2023), these solid images become blurred, revealing movements of collapse and transition. Although similar formal elements are repeated, they function less as replication than as gradual transformation.
 
In 《Whispering Currents》, the 'Flexible Forms'(2024) series extends this trajectory. In Flexible Forms 11.04(2024) and Flexible Forms 05.01(2025), horizontal and vertical lines that traverse the canvas serve to anchor trembling color fields. Straight lines operate as metaphors for an attitude of sustaining life, while unstable colors and forms search for equilibrium upon that structure.
 
Overall, his surfaces accumulate through layered brushstrokes and repeated formal units. Points, lines, and planes function as minimal elements that construct states of sensation rather than represent concrete objects. The canvas remains not a completed image, but a field in which transition is still in progress.

Topography & Continuity

Rather than relying on strong gestures or material excess, Yang explores the conditions of balance through restrained formal elements such as tonal variation, symmetry, and the arrangement of lines. This approach extends beyond formal experimentation to question modes of perceiving and understanding the world.
 
Beginning with reflections on darkness, then transforming the opposition between light and darkness into the sensory categories of blurriness and clarity, concentrating further on solidity, and finally blurring it once more, his trajectory reveals a consistent pattern of self-referential expansion. His practice develops by layering concepts rather than discarding them.
 
Compared to contemporary artists who move between geometry and amorphous abstraction, Yang distinguishes himself by resisting extremes. He moves back and forth between the geometric and the irregular, maintaining tension between the two. Balance is understood not as a fixed state but as an ongoing process of adjustment.
 
Looking forward, his work may further expand through relationships with spatial conditions, modes of arrangement, and variations in chromatic density. Emerging from sensation and extending into ontological inquiry, his painting is likely to continue evolving around the structural concept of balance rather than settling into a singular stylistic image.