Yoon Soyeon
Floating thought, 2024
Oil on canvas
65.1 x 91 cm
Unique work
Certificate of authenticity included
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About the work
- Materials
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 65.1 x 91 cm
- Frame
- Frame not included
- Signature
- No signature
- Certificate Of Authenticity
- Certificate included
Yoon Soyeon’s Floating Thoughts is less a depiction of a scene and more a meditation on how thought drifts - formless, fleeting, quietly persistent. The work unfolds through a layered process: a photograph of the sea is printed, folded into a paper boat, then unfolded and re-photographed. From there, a paper airplane takes flight across its textured surface. This is not mere play - it is choreography of memory, rhythm, and imagination. What we see is not the sea itself, but the memory of it, reconfigured and reframed. The creases of the folded photo become visual scars - marks of time and touch, like emotions folded and unfolded across the landscape of the mind. Geometry enters here, too: squares and triangles emerge not as rigid forms, but as moments of pause, fragments of thought suspended in motion. The paper airplane that soars across this sea of impressions is an ephemeral gesture - a metaphor for the way thoughts wander without landing. It is both an extension of the artist’s hand and a symbol of detachment: a longing to fly, to observe from above, to be unbound for just a moment. Beneath the surface calm, a quiet tension stirs. The sea seems still, but the air hums with the energy of unspoken feelings. Yoon’s palette remains restrained, her brushwork patient, allowing form and concept to breathe in tandem. The result is a canvas that feels both intimate and spacious, like a journal entry that chose not to use words. She does not seek to define emotion but rather to chart its drift - how it folds, expands, hovers, and eventually settles. In Floating Thoughts, the viewer is not given a destination. Instead, we are offered a kind of inner weather - a space where one’s own thoughts might begin to float, quietly echoing the artist’s.
About the artist
Yoon Soyeon’s paintings draw our attention to what we so often overlook: the quiet companions of daily life - delivery boxes, paper shopping bags, hand-folded paper planes. These modest objects, familiar to the point of invisibility, become transformed in her hands into something tender and strangely expansive. Her work does not seek drama or spectacle. Instead, it offers a delicate choreography of space and emotion - composed, restrained, but emotionally resonant. The spaces she constructs on canvas are not fixed interiors or defined exteriors. Rather, they are elastic rooms of feeling: containers of memory, stillness, and private reverie. A paper box in her work may be a room, a window, or a sea; it may hold the weight of routine or the lift of a fleeting dream. Using oil paint - a medium that rewards patience - Yoon builds her images slowly, allowing thought and feeling to collect between layers. Her preference for this slow-drying medium mirrors the pace of her inner rhythm. Painting becomes a space not of performance but of listening; not of resolution but of ongoing attention. There is an understated symbolism at play. The recurring presence of boxes and bags - fragile, temporary, and portable - becomes a metaphor for emotional containment and spatial possibility. They are at once grounded and nomadic, soft structures through which the artist navigates both the self and the outside world. Central to Yoon’s artistic philosophy is a quiet inquiry, often unspoken but persistent: Am I content? Am I still in love with this work? How long can I go on painting? These questions are not declarations of doubt but rituals of reflection - moments of pause that have accompanied her for more than two decades as a working artist. Her recent projects show an expanding horizon. The introduction of nature—sky, forest, sea - and elements like paper boats and airplanes suggest a desire not to escape, but to breathe. Her world remains rooted in the everyday, but her gaze reaches outward, gently. The box is still here, but now it contains wind. For Yoon, painting is not a means of escape from anxiety - it is a way of holding it, tending to it, allowing it to soften over time. Her work does not shout, but it stays. And in that staying, there is warmth, generosity, and a quiet resilience. If, in front of one of her paintings, a viewer finds themself smiling - softly, for no reason at all - then perhaps the painting has already done its work.