Youjin Yi – Back When Tigers Used to Smoke

With Back When Tigers Used to Smoke, Youjin Yi brings fairy tales, personal memory and cultural remembrance into a shifting visual world. Figures, birds and animals emerge within layered pictorial spaces where landscape and imagination meet. The tiger, a familiar figure in Korean visual culture, moves between meanings, opening inherited motifs to new and unexpected narratives.

Working across painting and traditional Korean hanji paper, Yi creates surfaces that feel at once physical and permeable. Fibers, folds, paint and open areas hold density and emptiness in delicate balance. Rather than looking back to a fixed past, the exhibition considers how memory and tradition change as they travel across languages, places and generations.