Youjin Yi South Korea, b. 1980

Youjin Yi was born in 1980 in Gangneung, South Korea, and lives and works in Munich. She began her studies at Sejong University in Seoul between 2000 and 2002, where she majored in Korean painting, immersing herself in traditional paper and brushwork. Frustrated by the standardised education system, she left and travelled through Europe, where encounters with art galleries and universities drew her toward German culture and its approach to art education. In 2004 she enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, where she studied until 2011. In 2008 she undertook a guest semester at the Universität der Künste Berlin in the class of Leiko Ikemura. She graduated from the Munich academy as Meisterschülerin of Professor Günther Förg, one of the most influential German artists of the postwar period, whose concept of the "Hintergrund," the background as an active pictorial and psychological space, became a pivotal framework for her own artistic development. She has been a member of the studio community at Werksviertel-Mitte in Munich and a recipient of the Werksviertel-Mitte Kunst studio grant.

Yi's practice is defined by a sustained negotiation between objective reference and abstract painterly structure, between the Korean sensibility she carries from her formation and the numerous cultural influences she has absorbed in Europe. Her paintings depict landscape spaces inhabited by figures, animals, objects, and hybrid forms that appear to dematerialise, fuse with their surroundings, or crystallise out of an atmospheric ground. The ambiguity of the motif is deliberate: Yi describes her work as a continuous pilgrimage toward artistic development and self-discovery, in which the act of painting is a form of reactive listening to accumulated perception and experience. She works on canvas and on Hanji, the traditional Korean paper, which she mounts on canvas, a material choice that carries the trace of her earliest artistic formation while opening the surface to the particular absorbency and texture that distinguish her work from Western painting conventions. Her iconography moves between the poles of imprint and culture, balancing what is innately hers with what has been acquired through displacement and encounter.

Yi's solo exhibition history spans Germany, South Korea, Switzerland, and France. Key presentations include Hybrid at the Artothek und Bildersaal München (2020); solo exhibitions in Daegu (2021) and Zurich (2021); a solo exhibition in Munich (2022); and Unprompted at 68projects by KORNFELD, Berlin (April to June 2024). Further solo presentations followed in Seoul (2025). Group exhibitions have included Body Language at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin (2023) and presentations at Kunstverein München (2023). She has been presented at Positions Berlin Art Fair through KORNFELD Galerie Berlin and at Kiaf Seoul.

KORNFELD Galerie Berlin has been central to the international development of Youjin Yi's practice. The gallery presented her first solo exhibition in Berlin, "Unprompted," at 68projects by KORNFELD from April to June 2024, showing paintings on Hanji paper mounted on canvas alongside works on canvas, and framing the exhibition around the question of cultural identity and the recognition of what is innately one's own through the experience of what is not. Yi also participated in the gallery's group exhibition "Body Language" in 2023. Her work has been presented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin at Positions Berlin Art Fair. Youjin Yi's practice continues to deepen at the intersection of two painterly traditions, producing a visual language that is entirely her own.