Yoon Soyeon

Yoon Soyeon’s paintings draw our attention to what we so often overlook: the quiet companions of daily life - delivery boxes, paper shopping bags, hand-folded paper planes. These modest objects, familiar to the point of invisibility, become transformed in her hands into something tender and strangely expansive. Her work does not seek drama or spectacle. Instead, it offers a delicate choreography of space and emotion - composed, restrained, but emotionally resonant. The spaces she constructs on canvas are not fixed interiors or defined exteriors. Rather, they are elastic rooms of feeling: containers of memory, stillness, and private reverie. A paper box in her work may be a room, a window, or a sea; it may hold the weight of routine or the lift of a fleeting dream. 한글번역: Using oil paint - a medium that rewards patience - Yoon builds her images slowly, allowing thought and feeling to collect between layers. Her preference for this slow-drying medium mirrors the pace of her inner rhythm. Painting becomes a space not of performance but of listening; not of resolution but of ongoing attention. There is an understated symbolism at play. The recurring presence of boxes and bags - fragile, temporary, and portable - becomes a metaphor for emotional containment and spatial possibility. They are at once grounded and nomadic, soft structures through which the artist navigates both the self and the outside world. Central to Yoon’s artistic philosophy is a quiet inquiry, often unspoken but persistent: Am I content? Am I still in love with this work? How long can I go on painting? These questions are not declarations of doubt but rituals of reflection - moments of pause that have accompanied her for more than two decades as a working artist. Her recent projects show an expanding horizon. The introduction of nature—sky, forest, sea - and elements like paper boats and airplanes suggest a desire not to escape, but to breathe. Her world remains rooted in the everyday, but her gaze reaches outward, gently. The box is still here, but now it contains wind. For Yoon, painting is not a means of escape from anxiety - it is a way of holding it, tending to it, allowing it to soften over time. Her work does not shout, but it stays. And in that staying, there is warmth, generosity, and a quiet resilience. If, in front of one of her paintings, a viewer finds themself smiling - softly, for no reason at all - then perhaps the painting has already done its work.