Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Jaeyeon Yoo had held solo exhibitions including 《Weeping Brushes》 (Dohing Art, Seoul, 2025), 《Night Sketch》 (Dohing Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Run Hide Tell》 (Art Sohyang, Busan, 2023), and 《Dream Weaving》 (Union Gallery, London, 2023).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Jaeyeon Yoo has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《When Fantasy Becomes Reality》 (Art Center Zain, Seoul, 2024), 《Stretching into a shape》 (New Spring Project, Seoul, 2023), 《STILL STANDING》 (Union Gallery, London, 2022), 《No One Is Here》 (Dohing Art, Seoul, 2021), 《Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night》 (Chapter II & Chapter II Yard, Seoul, 2020), and 《EMAP 2019 [BE COLORED]》 (Ewha Womans University, Seoul, 2019).

Awards (Selected)

Yoo is the recipient of the HIX AWARD (2016) and the Dentons Art Prize (2017).

Collections (Selected)

Yoo’s works are included in the collections of the MMCA Government Art Bank, MMCA Art Bank, and Hello Museum.

Originality & Identity

Jaeyeon Yoo’s practice has explored the point at which reality and fantasy intersect, mediated through the time frame of “night.” Beginning with Night Walker(2016), the ‘Night Walker’ series centers on figures walking alone through quiet nocturnal parks. These figures are not protagonists with fixed narratives; rather, they embody the “gaps” that arise between society and the individual, past and present, reality and ideal. The dual sensations of isolation and freedom that the artist has repeatedly referenced operate simultaneously within these night landscapes.
 
In works such as Night Skater(2018), Moon Reader(2019), and Wetland Stroller(2019), night functions not merely as a background but as a device that amplifies perception. The “Blue Time” she experienced while living in London is visualized through a pervasive blue tonality that envelops the canvas, blurring the boundary between the real and the unreal. The scenes depicted appear to belong to an actual city, yet they maintain a subtle estrangement, as though standing slightly apart from reality.
 
In her solo exhibition 《The Night is Young》(Gallery Lux, 2019), Yoo described these works as “fragments produced when the symbolic order constructed by the individual encounters the reality of society.” This awareness became further internalized in 《Great to see you》(Gallery Lux, 2021), following the pandemic period. During lockdown, the outside world—perceived only indirectly through a window—appeared flattened and subdued, while surreal scenes and symbolic presences increasingly filled the canvas.
 
In her more recent solo exhibitions 《Run Hide Tell》(Art Sohyang, 2023) and 《Weeping Brushes》(Dohing Art, 2025), her focus shifts from external landscapes to the internal space of creation. In 《Run Hide Tell》, “drawing” is metaphorically framed as running from reality, hiding within the canvas, and returning to the world to speak. The act of painting itself becomes a narrative structure. In 《Weeping Brushes》, she turns to the nocturnal studio and its tools, reconsidering the notion of “gap” not through landscape, but through the relationship between artistic practice and its instruments.

Style & Contents

Jaeyeon Yoo’s painting combines drawing-like lines with flat color fields. In the early ‘Night Walker’ series, figures and landscapes are constructed with relatively simple outlines and planar color, while thinly layered applications of paint create subtle depth. Her restricted palette, centered largely on blue tones, binds each scene within a unified atmosphere while simultaneously suggesting the duality of reality and fantasy.
 
As seen in Ice-cream Eater(2019) and On the blinking hill(2021), the surfaces may initially appear bright and reminiscent of animation, yet themes of anxiety, death, and absence quietly permeate the compositions. Recurring motifs such as the “boy,” the “grave,” and the “white bird” do not function as fixed symbols but remain fluid, open to transformation. The gap between the familiar surface and the subversive interior is itself a formal strategy within her work.
 
Meanwhile, her “piece-painting” series constitutes another significant axis of her practice. As seen in the ‘Home Boat’ and ‘Nightscape’ series, small marker drawings extracted from her sketchbooks are enlarged and given thickness, re-emerging as irregular panels installed in space. These works traverse the boundary between painting and sculpture, preserving the speed and immediacy of drawing while acquiring a tangible physical presence.
 
By the time of 《Weeping Brushes》, the focus of her compositions shifts from figure-centered landscapes to the interior of the studio. Drooping brushes, lumps of paint on a palette, ripples formed while washing tools, and paintings leaning against the wall in mid-process appear as elements that structure the temporality of creation. Here, texture and layered pigment function as records of sensory experience. Painting is no longer the depiction of an external landscape, but a site where interiority, tools, and space intersect.

Topography & Continuity

Jaeyeon Yoo’s work centers on visualizing the subtle emotional fragments and gaps that arise when reality and fantasy collide. While employing an animation-inflected vocabulary and a drawing-based painterly approach, her practice maintains a narrative density that resists reduction to mere image consumption, distinguishing it within contemporary painting.
 
Her experiences moving between London and Seoul leave traces of both urban sensibility and natural elements in her canvases. Following her recognition through the HIX Award 2016 and the Dentons Art Prize 2017, her work has steadily expanded through exhibitions such as 《Dream Weaving》(Union Gallery, London, 2023), 《Night Sketch》(Dohing Art, 2024), and 《When Fantasy Becomes Reality》(Art Center Zain, 2024). This trajectory reflects a foundation in universal affective states—such as isolation, freedom, anxiety, and contemplation—rather than reliance on a specific regional context.
 
Beginning with nocturnal landscapes, her practice evolved through the pandemic into more interiorized fantasies and surreal scenes, and has recently moved toward a meta-space centered on artistic action, tools, and the studio. Rather than expanding outward into the external world, this progression resembles a repeated and varied examination of the same core concerns across different layers.
 
Looking ahead, Yoo’s work is likely to continue unfolding across diverse spaces and contexts, grounded in the temporality of night, the immediacy of drawing, and the materiality of painting. Yet its trajectory appears less oriented toward grand expansion than toward the sustained observation and accumulation of subtle fissures that emerge where different worlds meet. Her canvas remains a site for contemplating those in-between spaces.