Bio:
Kyung Youl Yoon (b. 1947, Gangjin, Jeollanam-do, South Korea) is a Korean-born artist based in the United States since 1995. He studied painting, sculpture, and printmaking at the National University of Madrid (University of Bellas Artes) in Spain from the 1980s to early 1990s.
Yoon is best known for his ongoing Cubic Inception series, a body of sculptural paintings that explores perception, materiality, and spatial experience through modular constructions. Working with materials such as aluminum, acrylic glass, bamboo, brass, copper, hanji paper, and other found and industrial elements, his works blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. Depending on the viewer’s perspective, the compositions may evoke cityscapes, landscapes, or cosmic imagery, shifting between objecthood and metaphysical space.
Kyung Youl Yoon received a 2026 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In 2025, Yoon presented a solo exhibition, A Transcendent Eye, co-hosted by the Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Foundation and Donghwa Ode Gallery. In 2024, he was selected for a solo exhibition at the G & J Gallery of the Jeonnam Museum of Art, Seoul, titled The Echoes of Materiality, Towards Infinity, which introduced the Bamboo and Hanji series—an organic, nature-inspired extension of Cubic Inception. In 2023, he held solo exhibitions at the Rockefeller State Park Preserve and the New York Hall of Science, presenting works that integrated his earlier lyrical abstraction with his recent sculptural practice.
Yoon has held solo exhibitions at Galerie Bhak, Seoul (2021); Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Gallery, New York (2017); United Gallery, Korea (2015); and Detursa Galeria de Arte, Madrid (1994), among others. His work has been featured in major institutions including the Queens Museum, Seoul Arts Center, Shanghai Li Haisu Museum, Southern Utah Museum of Art, and the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles.
His practice has been widely introduced through interviews and publications, including a 2022 interview with art critic Peter Frank hosted by the AHL Foundation, and his inclusion in The Archive of Korean Artists in America (2023). Yoon has participated in international art fairs such as Art New York, Art Miami, Art Aspen, Art Palm Springs, Art on Paper, and the Hamptons Art Fair.
Active internationally since the 1980s, Yoon has exhibited extensively in the United States, Korea, Spain, and China, establishing a sustained and evolving practice that bridges material experimentation and perceptual inquiry.