featured artists
colors before words
Listen to the sound of Yoona Kwon’s silken whispers.
Yoona Kwon is drawn to color’s independent spirit as it alternates by context, mood, or the momentary inclination of an observer’s gaze. Using translucent materials such as silk or organza, she allows traces of emotion, memory, and presence to gather in layers. Each of her layers contains colors that seep into one another like spots of time, blending, diverging, and interrupting without warning.
Living in different cities and meandering through eclectic environments has taught Yoona to pay attention to the ways color, light, and texture carry and transport emotional tones. These are the situated impressions that continue to shape her perception and guide her palette.
From pale blue skies to warm tones of weathered posters and the visual echoes of crowded markets, Yoona’s colors hark back to moments that resurface in her studio. In When Softness Seeps into the Window (2025), she layered shades of turquoise, violet, and pale green until they flowed into each other like thin strands of light. Transcending the particularities of place, Yoona followed the timelessness of early morning light. Here, color represents a charged state of mind that has not yet transformed into language, evoking the ambiguous stillness that exists before words come to pass.
Whether a soft warmth, an underlying tension, or the particles of meaning that rattle without reason, Yoona’s colors cannot be understood in a clear or immediate fashion. Instead, they create atmospheric, emotional spaces that move beyond singular points of view, meeting points for strangers to unite, and pockets of silent reprieve where something stirs within and imagination knows no bounds.
