Hae Yoon

Photo: Pernille Sandberg

Hae Yoon is an Oslo based artist and multidisciplinary designer who has recently created the design for Novooi’s (re)made exhibition. Hae has previously co-designed the permanent Edvard Munch exhibition ‘Shadows’ at the new Munch Museum in Bjørvika, as well as the permanent exhibition at the Henrik Ibsen Museum in Grimstad. Her art is also exhibited at the contemporary gallery ‘KÖSK’ in Oslo.

Her practice has two central themes. First, she reflects on personal childhood challenges growing up in South Korea. Second, she studies how we perceive our surroundings, through studies of light, everyday objects and the surroundings they are placed in. Geometric shapes in her drawings are invitations to her subconsciousness. The combination of graphical elements and gradient shades is intended to blur the boundary between the viewer's physical space and the artist's subconsciousness.

“While working on design for clients, I was always drawn to create something that reflected my own stories and my own thoughts.” These experiences led to her expressing a sense of space through drawings. “The act of drawing creates the purest form of imagination. We all instinctively grab pen and paper when we want to capture an idea or a sudden surge of inspiration. Through drawing, I want my feelings and thoughts to be delivered as pure as possible."

Hae is currently expanding her practice from paper drawings to felt, building images in similar methods with locally produced materials.

Shop art by Hae Yoon

Felt Series

Hae Yoon’s felt series includes texts that reflect challenges or struggles from early childhood memories growing up in a hyper-competitive South Korean capital. Hand stitching was the artist’s first handcraft technique acquired as a young child, and also reflects the slow emergence of memories, one stitch at the time. The series is an attempt to clean out traumatic memories, while realizing that the creative process and the work itself becomes a record that cannot be erased.

Drawing Series

Hae Yoon underwent major reconstructive surgery as a child. Waking up from anesthesia, it was as if the body was still asleep and her eyes were shut - a feeling akin to death and life both being suspended. In these moments, different shapes in red emerged somewhere in her subconsciousness, and it felt like coming home.

What is a drawing and how can one deliver a sense of time in the form of a drawing?

Cutting, rotating and putting it back together, does it at some point become a sculpture, a 3D object? The two components of time are light and space. If space and light are both let into the drawing, will that make it a piece of time?