Yoahn Han primarily works with mixed-media paintings and digital collages, interweaving personal experiences, memories, and cultural identities in a poetic, sometimes surreal way. His works oscillate between abstraction and figuration, often featuring delicate, floating motifs.
"I live between identities. Bound by Confucianism and Christianity, my hands carve into materials to reveal the exquisite space I inhabit—an environment that simultaneously invites reflection on desire and insecurity while resisting slipperiness. I'm talking about seeing skin as a sensation, not just a surface. This exaggerated perspective, privileging body awareness over reason, guides my obsessions with the body's inner and outer beauty—its hideousness and also its splendor.
In my studio, I combine painstaking, repetitive cut-outs—the carving away of forms within forms—with applications of paint that rely on the slow metamorphosis of a wet surface becoming dry. The ordinary drying of the painted material results in something sublime that points to not-quite-identifiable body forms. Producing work at a pace that transitions from fast to slow, from considered to instinctive, bringing together meanings and ideas from different places, allows my paintings to serve as records of my "in-between" identity. YoAhn Han
We are pleased to announce the cooperation with YoAhn Han's Gallery, the Chase Young Gallery from Boston, Massachusetts