Seoul-based artist Miseon Yoon majored in textile art at Hongik University and was introduced to the art scene with her patchwork in 2009. However, after grappling with family pressures over societal expectations and her own personal anxieties, Yoon eventually broke from patchwork to experiment with different artistic expressions. Redirecting herself away from the gaze of others, her current work incorporates aspects of Cubism and involves the gradual adding of shapes and details that reflect the process of finding and re-assembling the fragments of oneself following deep hardship and trauma. Her use of spherical shapes is also meant to suggest the roundedness of a ball and symbolize a sense of balance:

“I transfer the feeling from being nervous through visual communication. My rejection toward the ordinary that I am filled with is naturally revealed in the work, along with the various images that are inspiring at each moment. I put my wounds on the table in the ways just as they are. With the audience’s sympathy, regardless of how low or high the level of it is, my goal reaches satisfaction with it. The portraits are meant to be self-portraits of myself or of you. (The portraits express the process of discovering identity in depth of myself or of you under the appearances on our surfaces.) The unbalanced nose and cheeks, eyes, and misaligned mouth is completed with my own realistic expression and the human characteristics to balance the inside of a human being. Thinking about the balance ball that we all have, I wanted to visually convey the anxiety, doubt, and fear that are often felt not to be worth leading in life as a driving force instead.”

Check out more of Yoon’s work below!