Younguk Yi Mutant Lab

Younguk Yi (b. 1991) lives and works in Seoul, where his practice has been shaped by rigorous training at Dankook University and advanced degrees from Hongik University. The Hole gallery (run by Kathy Grayson) presented Mutant Lab, Younguk Yi’s first solo exhibition in New York this October, introducing a painter whose work sits somewhere between hallucination and clinical observation.

Yi fills pristine white grounds with figures mid-recombination: bodies double, splice, stack; eyes align like windows; flesh hardens into scaffold. These blank spaces act less as neutrality than containment—exam-room, lab-like zones where bodies are measured and watched. Trained in Seoul, Yi paints by repetition and distortion, using airbrush gradients that hover between vapour and solidity, then sharpened by hand into uncanny precision. The work reads almost digital yet is rooted in obsessive drawing and anatomical study—calibrated, controlled, and subtly unstable.

Across the exhibition, bodies become stressed architecture, mirroring the speed and fragility of rapid modernisation. Collapsing grids and unstable structures suggest ambition, failure, and perpetual repair. In multiple rooms—choreographed wrestlers, trained dogs, yawning figures suspended in quiet absurdity—the paintings offer a dry, unsettling humour. Yi’s titles undercut solemnity, circling obedience, performance, and social anxiety, turning existential unease into sharp self-awareness. The work evokes science fiction not by other worlds but by revealing our own: a behavioral lab where gestures multiply and bodies proliferate while inner lives stay sealed and unknowable.