The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024: Yoora Lee
Throughout the paintings in “Lonely Crowd,” Yoora Lee’s solo exhibition at Half Gallery in Los Angeles this summer, a dreamy haze fell across lithe figures and familiar settings. The artist captured the window bar of a beach café, adorned with drinking glasses and bare limbs. Subway straphangers appeared in a row, their faces obscured by metal bars and jutting arms. A bride and groom are turned away from their wedding guests as the bride’s veil glistened with light. Figures looked past each other—or into their screens. Phones were ever-present, becoming their own dark or glowing characters, always available.
There is a fuzzy quality to Lee’s surfaces that evokes analog television and contrasts with the smooth, 21st-century technology she depicts. The artist also references global art and media from centuries past, which gives her canvases an uncanny relationship to time and place. Korean television dramas, 19th-century French masterpieces, and the artist’s own photographs are all among the inspirations for her compositions, which are finding admirers around the world. In 2023 alone, Lee has exhibited in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Tel Aviv. Her paintings ultimately evoke longing and loneliness, emotions that transcend the disparate eras, cultures, and technologies that she quotes.
Portrait of Yoora Lee by Jungwoo Lee. Courtesy of Nicodim Gallery.
Born in 1990 in Seoul, Lee is part of a generation that experienced a major transition to digital devices in their formative years. Personal cell phones and computers that hadn’t existed when she was a child were suddenly everywhere. “Still, I can’t live without my phone or computer or other media, so I think that’s naturally affected my paintings and what I want to paint about,” Lee told Artsy. The artist’s process, too, merges the analog with the digital. Lee often captures screenshots from TV shows or films, changing the figures to generate her compositions. She begins with drawing, then sketching, before she moves to the canvas.
Lee earned her BFA in painting from Korea’s Gachon University in 2015 and moved to the United States, where she earned her MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 2020. Lee’s ascent from being a student to an exhibiting artist has been quick. The next year, the city’s Jude Gallery offered the artist her first solo show. Two more solo exhibitions swiftly followed in 2022: “Finding the Missing Half” at Rome’s T293 and “Anemone” at New York’s Long Story Short (called Another Gallery at the time). Earlier this year, Nicodim Gallery announced their representation of the artist.
Yoora Lee, installation view of “Finding the Missing Half” at T293, 2022. Photo by Daniele Molajoli. Courtesy of T293.
While Lee relocated to Los Angeles in 2022, her paintings still reflect both her Korean upbringing and the art she absorbed during her time in Chicago. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884), Georges Seurat’s famous Pointillist painting of parkgoers, which hangs at the Art Institute, inspired Lee’s painting Cherry Blossom Festival (2023). She transposed Seurat’s festivities on the Seine to a location closer to home—a festival held along the Han River Park in Seoul—and gave her figures distinctly contemporary features. Shorts, backpacks, sneakers, metal cans, and baseball caps appear, along with the ubiquitous phones. “I was inspired by Seurat’s technique of using ambiguous boundaries and shades of light, rather than lines, to depict the edges of objects in his paintings,” Lee said.
The canvas was a part of Lee’s sold-out solo show “Lonely Crowd” at Half Gallery this past summer. The presentation followed Lee’s sold-out booth with the gallery at EXPO CHICAGO this past spring and evinced small transitions in the artist’s work. Before, Lee had focused on solitary figures and her personal love stories. Now, she’s wrangling together group scenes and images of the public onto her canvases. Melancholy remains a dominant mode. “There’s a real longing and romance in her work,” Half Gallery owner Bill Powers told Artsy. He compared Lee’s paintings to those of Theodora Allen and Edward Hopper. Like Allen, Lee paints scenes that seem to be simultaneously fading in and out. Like Hopper, the artist renders subjects lost in their own worlds. Her figures do not interact or connect, but gaze down or past each other in apparent contemplation.
Yoora Lee, Cherry Blossom Festival, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery.
Usually, Powers dislikes paintings of technology, which he said can quickly feel dated. Yet Lee offers a unique, atmospheric approach to the motif. Her figures, Powers said, are “so busy capturing the moment on their phones that they remove themselves from the moment they’re trying to hold on to. I think that’s a great irony of our lives.”
If Lee’s paintings hold appeal for the overarching moods they convey, they’re also adorned with strange and winning details. The artist loves looking back at media and fashion from decades past—the Y2K styles of K-pop icons or the 1980s styles her parents embraced, for example—and including their elements in her work. “Even those who experienced those times have a fantasy about them,” Lee said. “I’m one of them.” In On the Subway (2023), a painting depicting the Korean subway, each figure is a self-portrait, a detail that some viewers may miss; each lithe figure, with her straight dark hair, is an echo of the artist’s own likeness. The composition derives power from this off-kilter, almost sci-fi element.
Yoora Lee, On the Subway, 2023. Photo by Chris Hanke. Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery.
Two group shows swiftly followed “Lonely Crowd,” the show at Half Gallery. This fall, Lee’s work appeared in “Briefly Gorgeous” at PhillipsX in Seoul and “High Voltage 4” at Nassima Landau Art Foundation in Tel Aviv. In January 2024, Lee will open a solo show at Nicodim Gallery back in Los Angeles. Director Rachel Keller previously included Lee in “You Me Me You,” a 2022 group show at the gallery. Lee’s work hung alongside that of Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Nadia Waheed, and other young female artists whom Keller found to be working with sacred geometries and considerations of psychic space.
“She’s able to capture that existential feeling we all get when you’re in a space with tons of people…there’s this sense that you’re completely connected to them, just by being in proximity to them, but everyone’s in their own little internal world,” Keller said of Lee’s work. This is made stranger by the fact that this internal world is “outwardly focused,” with everyone on their phones, often on social media.
Yoora Lee, Restless, 2022. Photo by Yubo Dong, ofstudio photography. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery.
Yoora Lee, installation view of Shadow in the Water, 2022, at “Anemone” at Another Gallery, 2022. Courtesy of Long Story Short.
For Lee’s forthcoming exhibition with the gallery, Keller is encouraging the artist to “go big.” Her works have been “domestically scaled” in the past, she said, which makes sense, given their subject matter. But for the broad walls and high ceilings of Nicodim, Keller will give Lee the opportunity to experiment.
On a formal level, Keller admires Lee’s image croppings and her treatment of paint, which produces an attractive, nostalgic fuzziness akin to a technological glitch. If Lee ultimately conveys what she, the artist, calls “emptiness or longing for something,” there’s also a pleasure to be found in those feelings, suggested by the apparent softness of her surfaces and their harmonious, muted color palettes. Powers noted that Lee’s canvases appear more subtle in person than they do on the screen. In his description of the paintings, Powers suggested that it is this delicacy that prevents any kind of maudlin or regretful sentiment in Lee’s work. “It almost feels like melted crayon applied with butterfly kisses to a canvas,” he said.
The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024
The Artsy Vanguard is our annual feature recognizing the most promising artists working today. The sixth edition of The Artsy Vanguard features 10 rising talents from across the globe who are poised to become the next great leaders of contemporary art. Explore more of The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024 and browse works by the artists.
Header: Yoora Lee, from left to right: “Falling,” 2022. Photo by Yubo Dong, ofstudio photography; “Log Out,” 2023. Photo by Yubo Dong, ofstudio photography; “On the Subway,” 2023. Photo by Chris Hanke. All courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery.
