About

Yuna Yoon is a South Korean-Canadian self-taught visual artist based in Montreal. She works in various mediums, including watercolour, gouache, and wax pastel. Inspired by natural phenomena, outsider and folk art, her work explores themes of the unconscious, alienation, and belonging. She has exhibited work in Toronto and Montreal.

Artist Statement
My painting practice explores the unconscious, alienation, and otherness through a personal visual language. Shaped by lived experiences of not fully belonging, my work strives to overcome otherness, of being other and encountering the other. I am interested in how images can suggest presence without depiction, functioning as traces or echoes rather than fixed statements. In my work, I often use forms as guideposts, but the border between forms and abstraction is fuzzy and shifting. Instead of representation, I pursue atmosphere and resonance, allowing images to act as vessels for affect, energy, or knowledge that exceeds language. I work intuitively with various formats and mediums, including watercolour, gouache, and wax pastel, encouraging slippage, accumulation, and unpredictability.

My process begins with diaristic sketches drawn from everyday observation. Forms are gathered, layered, and reshaped through erasure, where removal becomes a means of revelation. I place particular trust in instinctive gestures and rapid decisions, sensing they carry forms of unconscious understanding inaccessible through deliberate control. I approach art as an experimental system that produces uncertainty, wonder, and imaginative displacement. Through transformation, the familiar becomes subtly strange and opens a space for negotiating identity by externalizing an interior landscape in an attempt to move through alienation.