"When sculpture's planar memory merges with painting's expanded spatial recall, new possibilities for artistic expression emerge." —Yune Seongjin, Artist Note, 2025

Sculpture today increasingly appears in hybrid forms, merging with painting, installation, performance, and video in both material and technique, expanding spatial and conceptual realm. Gallery JJ is pleased to present Yune Seongjin: 2 Faces, 2 Visions, a solo exhibition by sculptor Yune Seongjin whose practice probes territory beyond the inherited division between painting and sculpture, proposing new experiences of contemporary sculpture. By minimizing the mass and volumetric weight traditionally associated with sculpture while pursuing pictorial flatness, he presents what he terms 2-face sculpture—abstract objects with two painted surfaces that blend painterly experience within sculptural structure. This exhibition marks the first comprehensive showing of four years of work since his return to Seoul after an extended period in Paris, featuring new works including Folded Square along with some twenty freestanding and wall pieces that foreground his distinct plastic language grounded in its visual experience and the viewer’s shifting perceptual engagement.

Yune’s abstract sculpture, rooted in geometric form and principles drawn from calligraphy, examines where painting’s flatness meets sculptural structure. His work operates in this liminal zone, displacing sculpture’s claim to physical space toward tensions generated within the plane itself, reopening questions of surface and volume. What he calls painterly sculpture or 2-face sculpture is based on geometric abstraction and moves between the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and installation. By juxtaposing two different pictorial surfaces on a single thin panel, he initiates tension between plane and volume, leading the work to complete itself gradually by the viewer's bodily movement and shifting gaze. The work thus exceeds binary divisions—front and back, interior and exterior—producing another sensory space where atmospheres cross between the two faces.

Historically, art forms were never entirely sealed from one another. Throughout Western art history, sculpture existed subsumed within architecture and painting rather than as an independent medium. Only after the Renaissance did these forms crystallize into autonomous genres, and over time, their competition intensified towards self-definition. Sculpture’s identity has repeatedly been challenged—from Naum Gabo, who sought to escape traditional frameworks by reducing mass with new materials and connecting interior and exterior, to Kwon Osang, who brings photography into sculpture to pose questions about flatness and three-dimensionality.

In the early 1990s, Yune was first recognized for highly expressive work articulating shifting values and social upheaval driven by scientific advancement, and denouncing the destruction of environment and humanity. He worked in the lineage of 1970s material exploration in Korea, cutting and assembling silver aluminum panels, and these are now held in major collections in Korea and abroad, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. His emphasis on subjective expression and materiality eventually shifted toward geometric abstraction marked by balance and rational order. This turn traces back to the cultural atmosphere embodied in his two decades in Paris, to his early cruciform works, to sustained engagement with early twentieth-century art history including Russian Constructivism, and above all to his memory of calligraphy's plasticity.

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Line, Plane, Space

The geometric abstract objects present fundamental formal elements—line and plane—as both internal space and external structural presence. His restrained palette reinforces their compositional clarity. Some are perforated to efface interior and exterior boundaries, while others multiply through repeated squares and circles, expanding into surrounding space. Each work is understood within its overall context rather than through individual elements.

Yune pulls the formal sensibility of brushstrokes and linear actions from ink wash painting and calligraphy into space, and references modern art history through appropriation, transformation and structuralist thinking. He has sought to reduce mass in sculpture, focusing on the tensional relationship between interior and exterior space created by ink and void in calligraphy, expanding this into volumetric construct. The dynamism of brushstrokes doesn't remain on the surface but occupies the space they traverse; Yune brings such tension and trajectory between brush and paper into actual space, making space itself a sculptural reality.

This recalls the Western tradition of dessin—drawing as the foundation underlying sculpture, painting, and architecture. In this sense, Yune’s practice approaches as a form of spatial drawing, revealing an aesthetics of openness in which space remains expandable by elements pulled into it. Moreover, Heinrich Wölfflin’s distinction between linear and painterly modes positions sculpture as fundamentally linear. The metaphysical emphasis in disegno resurfaces in the early twentieth century, when Russian Constructivist reorganized form through reason and order, aiming to merge sculpture, design, and architecture into a consolidated language. From the Bauhaus onward, design evolved geometric abstraction into functional visual system. Yune’s abstract work operates in this continuum. His Homage to Kasimir Malevich marks this historical consciousness. His artistic practice bridging tradition and modernity suggests an attempt to locate a plastic archetype of unison spirit, and perhaps recalling the utopian dream once imagined through abstraction and universality.

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The Painterly Experience of Sculpture

At first glance, works in the exhibition may appear like paintings standing upright on the floor, or attached at angles to walls. Some carry representational, lyrical titles such as From Plants, The Moon, and Female, while others like Folded Square and Boxes induce visual illusion. Some resemble shaped canvases or grided supports for painting surface. Extending a plane creates volume. Yune constructs pieces from core plywood, a lightweight, stable material that can minimize mass while providing skeletal makeup and support for picture plane. The artist states he chose this material thinking of immaterial elements like afterimages and shadows, seeking to dissolve sculptural materiality as much as possible. What would he gain by resisting materiality and incorporating painterly means? The answer unfolds along several axes: formal experiment pursuing invisible reality; revealing space beyond painting's frame to expand the medium past two-dimensional image; inquiry into sculpture’s identity itself; and hinting at a painterly encounter with sculpture.

As the exhibition title suggests, by introducing pictorial perspective into sculpture, his work departs from the uncertain, discrete experience of traditional sculpture scattered across multiple viewpoints. Instead, it seeks to realize within sculptural structure the clarity of painting's frontal, singular, sustained gaze. Historically, painting asserted intellectual superiority over nature by representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface via perspective, while sculpture also claimed competitive edge through material presence, spatial occupation, and theatricality. Yune compresses this rivalry into his own vocabulary, working at the juncture where painting's flatness meets sculpture's spatiality.

What emerges is a surface simultaneously sculptural and pictorial—the picture plane expands beyond the repeated boundary of the frame and extends into real space as sculptural form, allowing them to transcend objecthood and gain new sensory depth within pictorial perception. The contemplative field once confined within canvas now exists in physical space, subject to the viewer's bodily movement and durational encounter. By introducing pictorial perspective into sculptural structure, Yune's work induces a painterly experience that transcends the division between painting's flatness and sculpture's volume.