Trains of Thought: Yunghun Yoo’s Paintings of Connection and Parting at 839 Gallery

In 1967, philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault delivered a seminal lecture outlining the concept of heterotopia. In Foucault’s view, a heterotopia is a “place without a place,” a space in which societal norms are both distorted and distilled, both reflected and transgressed. Among these heterotopias, Foucault named prisons, brothels, bars, cinemas, colonies and ships. Nearly half a century later, the artist Yunghun Yoo identified yet another heterotopia: the discursive Southern California transportation system.

Anyone who has ever had the fortune and the fortitude to travel Southern California by way of train will recognize—if only temporally—the heterotopia that Yoo encircles within his recently closed solo exhibition, “Union Station.” With gestural vigor, Yoo renders the slowgoing transfers, the phantom platforms, the eastward abyss, the detours to nowhere towns and the long, circuitous routes that must pass once or twice through Union Station tracks like blood through coronary arteries.

“My paintings (of trains) are more spaces than beings of transportation,” Yoo told Observer. “I was thinking about this idea of juxtaposing one world inside another world.”

The spatial ordinance of 839 gallery—habituated in the Hollywood bungalow of gallery owners Liz Hirsch and Joshua Smith—enhanced the thesis of Yoo’s work. Trains of thought hover over the kitchen sink, railway signals beside an empty telephone niche. Adjacent to the decommissioned fireplace and across from the record console was Exit Wound, a sweep of yellow blotted with smears of color, unmoored by ranging striations. Yoo explained that he was painting his interpretation of a gunshot wound—with patches of bruising, an undulating suture fixed at the canvas’s center, rivulets of technicolored blood spiraling out toward an abundant edge. Exit Wound also bears a striking resemblance to a bleeding landscape or a ruptured infrastructure or even a train that’s gone off the rails.

“I was trying to describe the idea of parting with something,” Yoo explained. “Like something that’s going through you has this pain, and it leaves a mark.”

In the hallway was the unassuming yet mystifying piece 8 (2). It is a small work with two columns of four nebulous spheres bound together by faint ligatures of color. They represent platform assignments, which in Southern California are subject to transpositions or reconfiguration or instantaneous expirations. Yoo experiments with opacity in the exhibition, ensnaring the ephemerality of train rides by blighting out loud swathes and strokes into quiet implications. 8 (2) suggests a connection but does not affirm it; it promises no reassurance that your train will arrive or that it will take you any closer to your destination once it does.

“The idea of connecting the two platforms together feels like a myth,” Yoo elaborated, “because when you’re on a train, you’re constantly going away from one place to a different place, but nevertheless, you’re on this physical track.”

Across the exhibition, some moments were abstract while others were far more tangible. Train II and Train III are among the few figurative works within the exhibition, both featuring cylindrical shapes chugging along train tracks. Yet they are still quite abstract: the points of perspective are askew, the landscapes that the trains traverse are no more than monochromatic hazes. Yoo said that he leaned into the intrinsic tension between the representational and the implied, running a second rail under the tracks of Train II or painting the freight in Train III to resemble a sushi roll. For Yoo, his practice is not a writ of execution but an active appeal, endlessly deferred against the tracks of judgment and interpretation.

“The line between representation and (figuration) gets blurry for me sometimes,” Yoo explained. “I usually start a painting from a mental image, rather than a representation… [Sometimes] the representation isn’t shareable to the viewer, not because I don’t want to share it, but because it starts from my head.”

Beach is another one of Yoo’s translucent and transferred paintings, but in the form of a self-portrait. At the center of the painting, a Vitruvian Man by way of stick figuration stretches out yellow limbs over a salmon square. The figure’s head, according to Yoo, hangs in a delicate balance; it is a marshmallow, halfway between roasted and charred. Courting a sense of distress, he animalistically scratches and scrapes into the canvas, etching out opacity by any means necessary.

Ultimately, Yoo paints from an interstitial place of discomfort and euphoria, where the body becomes another site of passage. The meaning of Yoo’s work, like movement, is never fixed but briefly and serendipitously encountered.

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