Areum Yang

Areum Yang's paintings begin in a feeling—a shiver of memory, a thread of scent, a moment lost in time. To encounter her work is to step inside atmosphere itself: thick with memory, layered in gesture and gently pulsing with a sense of longing that defies language. Her canvases resist clean explanations. They are not documentary, but they are rooted. Not illustrative, but utterly evocative.

Raised in Seoul, Areum’s relationship to art has always been deeply connected to the domestic. Rather than a bohemian, paint-splattered idyll, her early years were shaped by a sense of discipline and dedication. From middle school through university, she trained rigorously in classical drawing and painting—an education of the hand and eye, of repetition and observation, of building a toolkit she would later fracture and reassemble into her own intuitive vocabulary.

Her most recent work, created during her residency, is born from these fragments—from the simultaneous compression and expansion of home. Living in New York but shaped by Korea, Areum paints the emotional texture of in-betweenness. Her figures are loose, their anatomy ghosted, their hands rendered in crisp, learned detail one moment and dissolved the next. She paints interiors that feel familiar yet surreal: tables crowded with limbs and offerings, a lone cat paused mid-movement, laundry turning like memory in a washing machine. Inhabited by elusive characters, animals, and layered symbols, the paintings draw us into stories that resist resolution and deepen the sense of mystery.

In one painting, you find yourself seated at a dinner table. You don’t know who the guests are, only that you’ve been invited. There’s something tender in the arrangement—a certain tilt of a chair, the way a glass catches the light. Areum is interested in these unnoticed textures of intimacy: not just the meal, but the emotional density of being welcomed, of being watched, of being known. Another canvas recalls the soft courtyard of her grandmother’s home in Seoul—the scent of laundry, the sound of a hose sputtering to life, the hot white of sunlight on a child’s eyelids. Her grandmother has since passed, but the space lingers. It is, as Areum says, her most complete home, a place she returns to not for its architecture, but for its emotional permission. “That house, that yard, I think I go back to it because it’s gone. I can never return. But in painting, I can.”

Her materials mirror her approach. Oil, collage, fabric—clothes from moves past, scraps from old canvases, pieces once discarded and now redeemed. "I get ideas from small things," she explains. "A package from my mom, a piece of clothing, a plant pot. She sends me all these things from Korea. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I feel overwhelmed, but it becomes material." Paintings shift and reconfigure as she works. Some are born quickly. Others resist, collapse, get cut and buried. "Sometimes I feel like a painting is fighting me. If it keeps resisting, I destroy it. I cut it up. I don’t think all paintings deserve to live. But then those pieces, maybe I’ll use them again later." But Areum embraces the immediacy. "If I think too much," she says, "I lose the feeling." So, she moves between pieces, chasing the excitement of the new while trusting her instincts to loop back when needed. This rhythm allows space for error, for improvisation, for emotional intuition and for honesty. “Paintings never lie. The audience will know if you’re bullshitting,” she cautions. “That’s the scary part to me, too. You can’t be faking it.”

Throughout, Areum remains attuned to painting as a vessel for feeling. As we speak, she sits in front of a backdrop of books of artists whose energy and enthusiasm electrifies her: Hockney, Matisse, de Kooning, Harmony Korine. But she also draws from the quiet aesthetics of Korean domesticity: the curve of a ceramic bowl, the muted elegance of a wooden chest, the meticulous beauty of traditional Korean patchwork (chogakbo). These references live inside the work not as citations, but as inherited atmospheres.

To look at Areum’s paintings is to enter a space that is at once familiar and imagined. A place where home is not fixed but constantly forming, like a dream you wake from with the scent of something you can't name. They are paintings that do not explain, but instead invite you to feel—to sit at the table, to stand in the yard, to remember a place that may never have existed, except in the softness of longing.

Artist CV

Text by Emma Lucek Portrait by Aaron Gaab