Tia Yoon’s work explores the inner landscapes shaped by the struggles and attempts to love both the self and others. In confronting emotional ruptures, insatiable desires, and fractured identities that are often suppressed, Yoon creates spaces where wounds, especially those inherited through generational and systemic trauma, can be acknowledged, felt, and transformed. Drawing from shamanistic traditions and queer cultures, their practice channels energies that oscillate between transgression and tenderness through ritual and fictional mythologies. Their works serves as spaces for healing, resistance, and the emergence of alternative connections and identities beyond societal expectations and biopolitics. Embracing confusion, contradictions, and failures, Yoon’s non-linear process becomes a journey of integration; an exploration of what it means to love, connect, and heal. Through fictional characters, spirit languages, and fragmented narratives, they give form to the unseen dynamics that both wound and mend us. Yoon reclaims alienation through diving into intimate spaces of reflection where vulnerability becomes a strength, and could beheld for possibilities of transformation.
Tia Yoon is currently developing a series of paintings that explore how human connections can serve as reflective surfaces, revealing deeper truths about the self. In these works, encounters and collisions with the external world uncover hidden layers of the inner landscape, inviting a more intimate engagement with the unconscious.
The paintings are created using a visceral array of materials, including rabbit skin glue, bone ash, blood, salt, plaster, pencil, acrylic, and oil on canvas. These bodily substances were ritually cleansed in collaboration with a shaman, grounding the work in a spiritual practice that deepens its healing intention. This ritual acts as both anchor and portal, allowing the artist to descend into the dark sea of the psyche in pursuit of transformation and repair.
At the heart of this series is the understanding that trauma is not a monument to strength, but a quiet grave beneath the skin. It is a wound that does not seek glory, but asks instead for mourning, for witnessing, for tenderness. Survival, in and of itself, is enough. Not every wound needs to become a victory. Trauma should not be triumphed, but simply held with care, not heroized.
Tia Yoon’s work dwells in the autonomy of estrangement, tracing the subtle distances that shape and fracture human connection. Their paintings emerge from the tension between rupture and tenderness, where unhealed wounds speak through gesture, texture, and absence. Drawing from the body’s memory, they explore desire as displacement, silence as shattering, and intimacy as both a fracture and a holding. Each work is a quiet inquiry into where we split, where we stay, and what it means to be held, softly, even in absence.
