Yang Soonyeal is a contemporary artist based in Korea whose practice spans diverse genres, including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and media. For many years, the artist has explored how humans, objects, and nature are perceived and sensed as interconnected, inseparable entities. Her work views existence not as a fixed reality, but as a continuous process of creation and dissolution an inquiry that expands into reflections on the cycles, interdependence, and cosmic life order inherent in Eastern philosophy.
Resonating with the naturalistic world view of Gyeomjae Jeong Seon (a visionary 18th-century Korean painter who revolutionized the landscape genre by capturing the actual scenery of Korea),Yang Soonyeal spent over a decade sketching the nature.
Through this experience, she internalized the rhythm of the brush, the essence of void (yeobaek), and the sense of repetition. This foundational training in Korean painting continues to inform her formal language, dictating how she navigates line, rhythm, and space.
Her early Homo Sapiens series captures the invisible diversity within the human interior, while the Dream series transforms the invisible energy that drives life—akin to stars in the night sky—into visual structures. The artist perceives humans not as isolated subjects, but as beings where sensation, memory, and the subconscious overlap, existing within the order of nature, time, and the cosmos. This perspective forms the philosophical bedrock of her evolving artistic world.
The core concept permeating her work is "Expanded Motherhood". Moving beyond biological maternalism, this concept is understood as a generative principle that embraces and nurtures all things, serving as an ethics of relationship. Her representative series, Ottogi, visualizes this maternal worldview through forms that repeatedly find their balance amidst instability, revealing an Oriental order where Yin and Yang, creation and extinction, cyclically rotate. These forms simultaneously expose the vulnerability of human existence and symbolize the inherent power of resilience and continuity.
Amidst the contemporary shift toward AI and robotics, Yang Soonyeal’s art evokes the uniquely human values of sensation, connection, and care in a world dominated by efficiency and speed. Her work creates a philosophical arena that invites us to contemplate how humanity can coexist and relate to the world today