Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Yi’s major solo exhibitions include 《Deformation of the Frame》 (OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《When the remote control did not work, the drone crashed to the floor》 (Art Centre Art Moment, Seoul, 2023), 《A Fragment Thrown Up by a Dumped Image》 (Rund Gallery, Seoul, 2022), and 《181cm, 83kg, XS》 (Laheen Gallery, Seoul, 2021).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Yi has also participated in various group exhibitions, including 《APOLLO》 (WWNN, Seoul, 2025), 《Homo Narrans》 (Laheen Gallery, Seoul, 2024-2025), 《The Vanishing Horizon》 (WWNN, Seoul, 2024), 《Back to Back》 (everyArt, Seoul, 2023), and more.

Awards (Selected)

Yi Young Uk was selected for ‘2023 ARTIST PROLOGUE’ at Art Center Art Moment in 2022 and ‘2024 OCI YOUNG CREATIVES’ at OCI Museum of Art in 2023.

Originality & Identity

Young Uk Yi has persistently explored the point where the uncanny and the familiar collide through the formal language of repetition. Through the peculiar proliferation and arrangement of images, he attempts to reveal the psychological and social underside beyond visual perception. Around 2019, as repetition and sequencing became central to his work, the artist’s thematic concerns expanded from personal emotions to social norms, memory, and taboo.

Starting with the work The moment he shouted “Delicious!”, people turned their gaze toward him, but there was no food around him (2019), Yi adopted an observational attitude by transforming ordinary moments of daily life into uncanny scenes. This developed into an intuitive inquiry into psychological imbalance, social repression, and emotional ambivalence underlying reality. His work gradually evolved to conceal social taboos or evoke unconscious repression through recurring forms.

In his first solo exhibition, 《181cm, 83kg, XS》 (Laheen Gallery, 2021), the round and cheerful characters appear playful at first glance, but on closer inspection contain scenes that satirize sexual double standards or social hypocrisy. This suggests that the visual repetition is not mere decoration but a mechanism of veiled revelation. The artist strategically utilizes uncanniness disguised as familiarity to expose social falsehood.

In 《When the Remote Control Did Not Work, the Drone Crashed to the Floor》 (Art Center Art Moment, 2023), repetition and arrangement are presented as a method for dismantling internalized prejudices. Yi poses the question, “Can the repetition of beauty sustain the same beauty?” and continues his experiments to disrupt the automation of visual language. The work Anyone who deviates from the group has ample reason to be excluded (A gesture where anxiety causes a crack) (2023) reflects the anxiety of group dynamics and the sense of marginalization.

In the recent group exhibition 《Homo Narrans》 (Laheen Gallery, 2024), Yi’s interest expanded to include his personal narratives, sensory fragments of everyday life, and unstable identities. In works such as Portrait of a Person Slightly Touching Their Nose (2024) and The Final Portraits of Those Who Became Constellations in the Sky (2025), the habits of people around the artist and memories of loss are embodied through repetition and transformation, marking a full emergence of Yi’s introspective narrative.

Style & Contents

Yi’s practice began with oil-based realist painting and gradually moved toward experiments in collaging disconnected images, later transitioning into pattern-based painting through recurring motifs. In 《181cm, 83kg, XS》, rounded characters fill the canvas, juxtaposing playfulness and suggestiveness, and deconstructing iconographic forms. At this stage, his painting used repetition to establish new visual orders while disrupting existing modes of perception.

In 《When the Remote Control Did Not Work, the Drone Crashed to the Floor》 (2023), the artist initiated a full-fledged transition from two-dimensional works to three-dimensional forms. The installation painting The amberjack that ate feed mixed with chocolate didn’t think the feed was special, and those who ate the amberjack didn’t realize it had eaten chocolate feed (2023), reminiscent of Damien Hirst’s controversial works, segments the body of the fish into cubic forms made from wood and aluminum. Blurring the boundaries between flatness, dimensionality, and motion, the work provokes visual confusion and perceptual disorientation, disrupting the continuity of space and perspective.

Returning once more to painting, the solo exhibition 《Deformation of the Frame》 (OCI Museum of Art, 2024) experimented with strong continuity by connecting fragmented bodily images through airbrush techniques. In Portrait of a Person Who, Distrusting Others, Only Thinks About Counterarguments While Listening (2024), realistic depiction and distorted anatomy coexist, creating sensory conflict. The artist derives rhythm and emotional resonance within the painting through subtle variations in repetition.

The repetition of manipulated bodily fragments becomes more intimate in The Final Portraits of Those Who Became Constellations in the Sky (2025). This work encapsulates Yi’s perceptual mechanism, shaped through a cyclical movement between flatness and dimensionality and back again to painting. Through fragmentation, variation, and repetition, he explores the endless combinatory potential of images, triggering a chain reaction of sensory collisions.

Topography & Continuity

Since 2019, Young Uk Yi has retraced the structural mechanisms of contemporary visual culture through the format of “repetition.” By using repetition and sequencing as seemingly simple visual languages, he dismantles sensory structures and captures the uncanny emotions and perceptions that emerge within those cracks. His practice—crossing painting, installation, and sculpture—unsettles the boundary between flat and dimensional, static and dynamic visuality, a rare endeavor within Korean contemporary art.

He has visually reified discomfort, uncanniness, and veiled emotions that conventional painting could not contain, effectively pioneering a new aesthetic category of “visual disorientation.” Works such as The amberjack that ate feed mixed with chocolate... (2023) evoke both the flat and the spatial, proposing new narrative structures of sensory experience and actively involving the viewer’s physical perspective.

Solo exhibitions like 《181cm, 83kg, XS》 and 《When the Remote Control Did Not Work, the Drone Crashed to the Floor》 presented the playful manipulation of form and sensory collision, offering a framework for dismantling and recomposing the language of painting itself. 《Deformation of the Frame》 succeeded in expanding both the narrative and internal depth of painting through repetition.

More recently, Yi has extended his methodology to manipulate or deconstruct mundane personal stories of himself and those around him, experimenting with narrative composition. The exhibition 《Homo Narrans》 transformed autobiographical and anecdotal fragments, previously excluded from his practice, into “manipulated forms,” generating new points of deviation within repetition. This indicates an increasing entwinement between Yi’s painting and narrative structures.

Beginning with painting and expanding into three-dimensional and digitally-inflected perceptual formats, Yi’s approach serves as a meaningful model for how contemporary painting can reconstruct frameworks of perception and sensory engagement beyond the bounds of visual representation.