Hakgojae
Gallery is pleased to present Shapeless Loop, a solo exhibition by Yoori (b. 1994), from November
19 (Wed) to December 20 (Sat). This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition
with the gallery. Featuring approximately 52 new works, including paintings and
object installations, the exhibition encapsulates the structures of thought and
textures of perception that the artist has recently explored.
Over
the years, Yoori has developed her artistic practice around the core theme of
connectivity. She explores how meaning emerges and transforms across different
layers—between language and visual language, painting and medium, image and
paper, interior and exterior, self and other. Her approach focuses on composing
relations rather than dissolving boundaries, translating abstract notions of
connectivity into a visual language and expanding them into embodied thought.
The
grain of reality we sense and experience always flows at a point that language
cannot fully capture. Within that indeterminate margin—an unruly interval that
resists definition—the artist reads what she calls-‘invisible sentences’. For
Yoori, this margin is neither incidental nor peripheral. Rather, she is drawn
to the incommunicable sensibilities that emerge between verbal and visual
languages, and she has long grounded her practice in the very site where
meaning refuses to be reduced to words.
Painting
and artist’s books are not mere modes of expression. They are laboratories in
which language is dismantled and reassembled. Within them, images and concepts,
material and thought, intertwine and intersect, unsettled by the ceaseless
trembling of form and meaning. The artist investigates this trembling—the
sensory interval produced by the absence of language—constructing, within
linguistic insufficiency, a new language altogether.
Painting
becomes another language operating outside the boundaries of the verbal. It
does not form sentences, nor does it speak. Yoori’s paintings are sentences
composed of words that do not exist, an unreadable poem and an uninterpretable
novel.
The
artist positions herself as a connector of disparate strata: ‘language and
visual language’, ‘painting and medium’, ‘image and paper’, ‘interior and
exterior’, ‘self and other’. Here, ‘connectivity’ stands as the core concept
that traverses her practice. It signals a mode of linkage that exceeds physical
structure, unfolding instead on an invisible and affective plane. It is the
evidence of relations that have no concrete form yet undeniably exist—a subtle
vibration that binds one being to another.
The
exhibition Shapeless Loop unfolds along two conceptual axis.
The first is the exploration of continuity between presence and absence. Yoori
does not perceive life and death, beginning and end as opposites, but as a
single circular flow that mirrors and reflects itself. From the resemblance
between a candle on a birthday cake and one at a funeral, or between a mourning
ribbon and a gift ribbon, she draws a profound insight: identical forms can
carry entirely different layers of emotion. The subtle shift between these
emotions marks the precise point where presence and absence converge. By
capturing these moments of symbolic transition, the artist reveals life and
death, beginning and end, not as divided states but as cyclical reflections of
one another. This is both her way of perceiving the world and an ethical method
of contemplating loss and mourning. Her paintings thus record absence while
simultaneously serving as rituals of consolation, reconnecting what has
disappeared.
The
second axis is the exploration of the structures of connection between
different existences. The ‘Shapeless Loop’ in her work does not denote a solid
ring; it symbolizes a fluid, unbroken flow of relations. It expands into
multi-layered structures linking inner and outer worlds, perception and
thought, the individual and the collective. Through the traces of intersecting
and circulating lives, the artist depicts the transparent networks that
surround us—currents that are barely perceptible yet undeniably present—made
visible through the dual media of painting and book. Her practice is not about
revealing the invisible; it translates the imperceptible into sensory
experience. The pictorial surface becomes a site where different beings
encounter and merge one another, leaving traces as layers of color and texture.
By
revisiting the archetypal meaning of ‘connection’, Yoori suggests that all
relations are born from absence. Her paintings grasp the rhythm of a world that
cannot be fully reduced to language, revealing within its subtle tremors a new
order of being—where existences sense and connect with one another. They are
fields of relations, perpetually forming, dissolving, and reuniting. Shapeless Loop is thus an attempt to capture
the texture of invisible relationships and a sensory exploration of a world
before language. As a fluid and ‘Shapeless Loop’ where disparate beings
intersect and permeate one another, the exhibition lingers beside us as a quiet
resonance.
