Seoul-based artist Younguk Yi creates some of the most disorienting and bizarre figurative paintings in contemporary art, transforming traditional portraiture into what he describes as "bodies in negotiation with altered postures, tensions and relocated limbs." His work deliberately challenges the human brain's natural ability to recognize faces, a process that typically occurs within 90-130 milliseconds through a phenomenon called face pareidolia. Instead of creating familiar imagery, Yi's paintings feature exploded human forms that appear to glitch and replicate themselves like malfunctioning computer windows.
Yi's artistic inspiration stems from Korea's urban landscape, particularly aging buildings, collapsing alleyways, and unfinished concrete structures that reveal what he calls "social memories, time sedimentation and latent fractures." This architectural decay becomes the foundation for his kaleido-collage drawings, which he then transforms into paintings that feature bodies covered in ripples of contours and faces adorned with galleries of multiple eyes. The resulting artworks look as though "a person glitched like a computer window, frantically replicating itself in rows of fleshy chaos" or as if "a painting fell down the stairs, rearranging everything within its frame."
The artist's approach to figurative painting is radically unconventional, creating what he describes as frenzied figurations that resemble "biblically accurate angels with their uncanny valley levels of contortionist." Yi explains that his most productive creative state involves "playing in disorientation," deliberately making viewers feel their perception wobble. "When the eye cannot settle, when the body becomes aware of its own viewing, the work has already begun," Yi says about his eye-vibrating artworks that feature seven-headed dogs and copy-pasted waves of faces.
Yi's artistic philosophy connects directly to Korea's complicated relationship with architecture and development. While architecture in Korea has long symbolized progress and stability, the artist points to historical disasters that tell a different story: the collapse of the Sampoong department store, the failure of Seongsu Bridge, and ongoing structural controversies surrounding public housing. These societal ruptures become visual metaphors in his work, rendered as bodies that collide with anatomical logic.
The paintings completely remix the rhythms of facial recognition, creating what Yi calls "not subjects of faithful depiction" but rather figures that resist singular readability. His work reveals entirely new visual systems that diverge from conventional ways of looking at faces, bodies, and phenotypes. The result is art that serves as both hilarious and slightly uncomfortable exercises in visual perception, challenging viewers to keep their eyes still while processing the chaotic imagery.
Yi's supremely weird paintings represent a bold departure from traditional figurative art, using slapstick and disharmony to create a unique artistic language. His work transforms the familiar human form into something alien and unsettling, yet oddly captivating, forcing viewers to confront their own assumptions about how we see and interpret the human body in contemporary art.
