Jaeyeon Yoo
The central concern of Jaeyeon Yoo’s work is to determine how the personal imaginary world has been constructed in the real world in order to escape from inauthentic reality – how is it enacted or embodied? Informed by her experience growing up in Korea, Yoo’s painting stage the tensions between maintaining tradition and national identity in a cross-cultural context, and a personal desire to escape reality.
Her recent paintings, based on her family’s photographs of celebrations from the ‘90s, come from the collision between reality, childhood memory, and childhood fantasy. Lit by a bright flash, the women and children the populate the weddings and birthday parties are transported in subtly unsettling alternative realities: suddenly outdoors, their features blurred and colours slightly distorted as if screened on an analogue TV, the sense of strangeness heightened by the presence of unexpected creatures.
Interweaving childhood sense of play with adult mediations of ‘reality’, Yoo creates alternative realities, embracing Escapism as a gesture of an imaginary resistance for an inauthentic world.
The Last Bow, 2018
Oil on canvas
145 x 122 cm
Farewell, 2018
Oil on canvas
72.7 x 60.6 cm
Child and the Bride, 2016
Oil on canvas
52 x 45.5 cm
