{"id":20013,"date":"2026-01-09T20:19:55","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T20:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/09\/yunghun-yoos-paintings-of-connection-and-parting-at-839-gallery\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T20:19:58","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T20:19:58","slug":"yunghun-yoos-paintings-of-connection-and-parting-at-839-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/09\/yunghun-yoos-paintings-of-connection-and-parting-at-839-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Yunghun Yoo\u2019s Paintings of Connection and Parting at 839 Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Exit Wound<\/em> portrays the carnage left by a gunshot as landscape, with the flesh splintering and twining into horizon lines. Photographed by Kyle Tata. Courtesy of artist and 839.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1967, philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault<\/a> delivered a seminal lecture outlining the concept of heterotopia. In Foucault\u2019s view, a heterotopia is a \u201cplace without a place,\u201d a space in which societal norms are both distorted and distilled, both reflected and transgressed. Among these heterotopias, Foucault named prisons, brothels, bars, cinemas, colonies and ships. Nearly half a century later, the artist Yunghun Yoo<\/a> identified yet another heterotopia: the discursive Southern California transportation system.<\/p>\n

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Anyone who has ever had the fortune and the fortitude to travel Southern California by way of train will recognize\u2014if only temporally\u2014the heterotopia that Yoo encircles within his recently closed solo exhibition, \u201cUnion Station<\/a>.\u201d With gestural vigor, Yoo renders the slowgoing transfers, the phantom platforms, the eastward abyss, the detours to nowhere towns and the long, circuitous routes that must pass once or twice through Union Station tracks like blood through coronary arteries.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy paintings (of trains) are more spaces than beings of transportation,\u201d Yoo told Observer. \u201cI was thinking about this idea of juxtaposing one world inside another world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spatial ordinance of 839 gallery\u2014habituated in the Hollywood bungalow of gallery owners Liz Hirsch and Joshua Smith<\/a>\u2014enhanced the thesis of Yoo\u2019s work. Trains of thought hover over the kitchen sink, railway signals beside an empty telephone niche. Adjacent to the decommissioned fireplace and across from the record console was Exit Wound<\/i>, a sweep of yellow blotted with smears of color, unmoored by ranging striations. Yoo explained that he was painting his interpretation of a gunshot wound\u2014with patches of bruising, an undulating suture fixed at the canvas\u2019s center, rivulets of technicolored blood spiraling out toward an abundant edge. Exit Wound<\/i> also bears a striking resemblance to a bleeding landscape or a ruptured infrastructure or even a train that\u2019s gone off the rails.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was trying to describe the idea of parting with something,\u201d Yoo explained. \u201cLike something that\u2019s going through you has this pain, and it leaves a mark.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Abstract\"Abstract
The title of 8(2)<\/em> comes from Track 8 at Union Station, the largest passenger rail station on the West Coast. Photographed by Kyle Tata. Courtesy of artist and 839.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the hallway was the unassuming yet mystifying piece 8 (2)<\/i>. It is a small work with two columns of four nebulous spheres bound together by faint ligatures of color. They represent platform assignments, which in Southern California are subject to transpositions or reconfiguration or instantaneous expirations. Yoo experiments with opacity in the exhibition, ensnaring the ephemerality of train rides by blighting out loud swathes and strokes into quiet implications. 8 (2)<\/i> suggests a connection but does not affirm it; it promises no reassurance that your train will arrive or that it will take you any closer to your destination once it does.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of connecting the two platforms together feels like a myth,\u201d Yoo elaborated, \u201cbecause when you\u2019re on a train, you\u2019re constantly going away from one place to a different place, but nevertheless, you\u2019re on this physical track.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the exhibition, some moments were abstract while others were far more tangible. Train II<\/i> and Train III<\/i> are among the few figurative works within the exhibition, both featuring cylindrical shapes chugging along train tracks. Yet they are still quite abstract: the points of perspective are askew, the landscapes that the trains traverse are no more than monochromatic hazes. Yoo said that he leaned into the intrinsic tension between the representational and the implied, running a second rail under the tracks of Train II<\/i> or painting the freight in Train III<\/i> to resemble a sushi roll. For Yoo, his practice is not a writ of execution but an active appeal, endlessly deferred against the tracks of judgment and interpretation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe line between representation and (figuration) gets blurry for me sometimes,\u201d Yoo explained. \u201cI usually start a painting from a mental image, rather than a representation\u2026 [Sometimes] the representation isn\u2019t shareable to the viewer, not because I don\u2019t want to share it, but because it starts from my head.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beach<\/i> is another one of Yoo\u2019s translucent and transferred paintings, but in the form of a self-portrait. At the center of the painting, a Vitruvian Man by way of stick figuration stretches out yellow limbs over a salmon square. The figure\u2019s head, according to Yoo, hangs in a delicate balance; it is a marshmallow, halfway between roasted and charred. Courting a sense of distress, he animalistically scratches and scrapes into the canvas, etching out opacity by any means necessary.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Yoo paints from an interstitial place of discomfort and euphoria, where the body becomes another site of passage. The meaning of Yoo\u2019s work, like movement, is never fixed but briefly and serendipitously encountered.<\/p>\n

\"Abstract\"Abstract
Beach<\/em>, at once a Vitruvian Man and a psychological sketch, showcases the flexibility of Yoo\u2019s visual language. Photographed by Kyle Tata. Courtesy of artist and 839<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

More in Artists<\/h3>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Trains<\/p><\/div>\n