If a person glitched like a computer window: Inside Younguk Yi’s supremely weird paintings

It’s been found that the human brain detects faces 90-130 milliseconds after looking at an object that could slightly resemble a face – it’s called face pareidolia. Of course, our eyes are trained to recognise faces in unfamiliar environments because we look at faces all day long. But this is certainly not Younguk Yi’s goal, instead the Seoul-based artist’s most productive state is playing in disorientation – which might be an understatement for his eye-vibrating artworks. “When viewers feel their perception wobble – when the eye cannot settle, when the body becomes aware of its own viewing – the work has already begun,” says Younguk.

Younguk’s kaleido-collage drawings are inspired by cities – aging buildings, collapsing alleys and unfinished concrete frames that reveal social memories, time sedimentation and latent fractures. This is then translated into exploded figurative artworks that rib bodies with ripples of contours and faces with galleries of eyes. His paintings look as if a person glitched like a computer window, frantically replicating itself in rows of fleshy chaos – or if a painting fell down the stairs, rearranging everything within its frame.

Here, the rhythms of facial recognition are completely remixed, something Younguk calls “not subjects of faithful depiction but bodies in negotiation” with altered postures, tensions and relocated limbs – resisting singular readability. Younguk’s frenzied figurations almost look like “biblically accurate angels” with their uncanny valley levels of contortionist.

In other words, these paintings are pretty bizarre! Architecture in Korea has long been synonymous with progress and stability, yet Younguk says history tells a different story: the collapse of the Sampoong department store, the failure of Seongsu Bridge and structural controversies surrounding public housing. Younguk renders societal ruptures into bodies colliding with anatomical sense, revealing entirely new visual systems that divert from what we know about looking at faces, bodies and phenotypes, instead becoming hilarious and slightly uncomfortable exercises in keeping your eyes still.