YOON CHANG
MEET THE ARTIST: YOON CHANG
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MEET THE ARTIST: YOON CHANG 〰️
Yoon Chang (b. 1986, Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean American abstract painter based in Los Angeles. Her paintings explore memory through layered fields of color, gesture, and atmosphere, creating what she describes as "internal landscapes" spaces where experience is transformed through recollection rather than representation.
After immigrating to the United States as a child, Yoon developed an enduring interest in how memory reshapes our relationship to place. Growing up surrounded by the vibrant color library of her family's silk-screen business and later working for nearly a decade as an interior designer, she developed a visual language that balances structural clarity with intuitive mark-making. Today, her practice draws on both disciplines, allowing order and spontaneity, restraint and freedom, to coexist within the same painting.
Yoon received her B.F.A. in Interior Design from Pratt Institute. She has exhibited internationally, including Francis Gallery, SCOPE Miami Beach, SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York, and TTEART Gallery in Seoul. Her work is held in private and corporate collections, including Eastdil Secured and mardi mercredi.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings begin with memory, not as a fixed image, but as a fluid, fragmented state continuously reshaped by time. I am interested in the landscapes that remain after experience has passed: the colors, rhythms, and emotional traces that linger long after specific details have faded. Through lavered fields of color, gesture, and transparency, I construct internal landscapes. These spaces are not literal depictions of geography, but translations of how a place or moment is absorbed and carried within the body. While a coastline, a room, or a fleeting encounter may serve as a point of origin, the process of painting intentionally moves the work away from representation toward the essence of recollection. My process is intuitive and rooted in automatism, allowing one gesture to inform the next in response to the movement and atmosphere forming on the surface. Within each piece, structure and spontaneity continually negotiate; some areas remain deliberate and contained, while others are left loose, translucent, or unresolved. This tension reflects mv own relationship to place and belonging, situated between cultures, environments, and varied was of seeing. While my background in interior design informs my understanding of proportion, balance, and structure, painting allows me to both utilize and resist that formal training. Rather than constructing a space with predetermined boundaries, I allow the composition to emerge through instinct, revision, and accumulation. Ultimately, I am interested in the threshold where personal memory becomes universal and the painting no longer belongs entirely to my own experience. I intend for the work to function as an open space that viewers can inhabit with their own associations and emotional landscapes.
