Yooyun Yang: Dog-ear 복기

Dog-ear 복기 brings together eleven new paintings by Yooyun, accompanied by a text by Duarte Sequeira. ⁠ ⁠

The title comes from that small fold at the corner of a page, the one that says I was here, I want to return. The figures in these works blur and dissolve, slipping back into the surface of the paper rather than meeting the viewer's gaze. They are not portraits in any conventional sense. They are closer to states than to subjects, to the residue of an encounter than to the encounter itself.⁠ ⁠

The work is rooted in a set of quiet but insistent questions about perception, presence, and what it means to face another person. Running through it is also the Korean Go concept of bokgi, the practice of replaying a finished game move by move to understand where it went. Beneath all of this, though, is a more personal inquiry the paintings keep circling: how clearly we are actually encountering one another now, when faces are everywhere and the feeling of real presence keeps thinning.⁠