Oil on wood
15.8″ x 11.9″
“One morning, while still half-asleep, I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet without an idea of turning on the light. Shadowed by asthenic emotions, I passively gazed into the air hoping that I could rather go back to my bed. Then suddenly, something popped out from the umber shadow hung over the bathtub as if insisting on its ontological existence. What caught my myopic eyes was a baby oil: such an unappealing object I had never thought about aestheticizing it until then. Reflecting the somber sunshine sifted through the opened door, the bottle indeed showed a flicker of the sublime, which inspired me to bring my camera into the murky bathroom.”
Youn presents rediscovered commonplace objects in the form of a snapshot or noir still-cut. She estranges them by the photographic out-of-focus effect, while projecting certain emotions onto the still-life scene so as to relocate the mundane into a new, psychological context. It is her task of finding the sublime out of the overlooked or forgotten, and visualizing the subject’s psyche with which the viewers can spontaneously empathize. Therefore, her paintings are psychologically charged, evocative of personal memories.