Installation
view of 《TWO
SERPENTS》 ©WWNNWWNN is presenting 《TWO SERPENTS》, a solo exhibition by artist
Miryu Yoon, on view through July 18.
Miryu Yoon explores the intersection where
fictional beings and sensations meet real individuals, investigating how these
encounters can be embodied through the medium of painting.
Through her previous solo exhibitions, 《Pyromaniac》 (2023) and 《Do Wetlands Scare You?》 (2024), Yoon has
increasingly focused on painting as her primary mode of expression, creating
fictional worlds centered around female figures as character-like personas.
In this process, the artist takes on a role
akin to that of a director—selecting symbolically charged settings and staging
painterly scenes with real people, which she captures in photographs. These
images, taken using the “Live Mode” function on an iPhone, are then translated
onto canvas, a traditional medium of painting, as the final works.
Installation
view of 《TWO
SERPENTS》 ©WWNNLike her previous exhibitions, 《TWO SERPENTS》 was also produced through a
“pre-production” process. This time, a professional photographer contributed to
the development, and the central figure of the paintings is “Jungle,” a
professional model and a well-known micro-celebrity within the queer community
who identifies as a transgender woman.
Until now, Miryu Yoon had worked with
people she already knew—family, friends, and acquaintances—rarely revealing
specific personal details or contexts about them. However, in this series, the
inclusion of a transgender woman as the subject opens up the possibility for
the work to be read as a political gesture, solely through the presence of her
body.
Still, within Yoon’s ongoing long-term
project, “Jungle” cannot stand as an exception. This duality—between the
specific and the universal—resonates with the symbolism of the serpent
referenced in the exhibition’s title. According to mythologist Jean C. Cooper,
the serpent is a “universal symbol of profound complexity” across both Eastern
and Western cultures. Its ouroboros form—biting its own tail—embodies death and
destruction, life and rebirth, time and destiny. Most notably, the serpent
represents a self-generating (parthenogenetic) being—one that can be either
male or female.
Installation view of 《TWO SERPENTS》 ©WWNN
In Miryu Yoon’s painting, “Jungle”—the
“serpent woman”—plays cat’s cradle with red thread and inscribes abstract
patterns into the sand. Yoon’s vigorous, rapid brushstrokes dominate the
canvas, while thick applications of paint form barnacle-like textures that
create a tactile surface, stimulating the viewer’s sensory perception.
The contrasting textures of the clothing,
fabrics, and barnacles provoke visual pleasure, and together with Jungle’s
portrayal—a transgender woman and iconic figure—they generate a double vision.
Jungle appears not merely as herself, but as a confident, yet dreamily dazed
“serpent woman,” suspended somewhere between self-assurance and trance.
