숨: Breath | Breathe

Jaye Jiyoung Yoon (Jaye 지영 윤) practices “Visual Literature” through mixed-media works: Korean essays (supil) with croquis art and English poetry with layered, tactile pieces on canvas. Raised in Iraq, she studied English Literature, began drawing in 2011, and later joined the Korean Fine Arts Association.

At the core of her work is Strategic Self-Narrative™, her method of reflection and creation, exploring how a self is constructed from fragments of lived experience. Yoon leaves figures faceless, not as erasure of identity, but as an invitation to meet—The Passing You and The Watching Me. Fluorescent color refuses to behave, pointing to an ever-present true self—one that persists through life’s circumstances, whether dimmed by the mundane or spotlighted in special moments, recognized or not.

Reconstructing her spontaneous life drawings onto canvas, Yoon transforms an immediate lived moment into a conscious act of reflection and interpretation. Through layering, erasure, and reconstruction, and extending the principles of yeobaek (spaciousness of the unsaid) and haehak (warm resilient humor), she brings text and visual art into active dialogue—a spirit also reflected in her biweekly visual essay column, Breath (숨), in The Hankyoreh since July 2025. 

During her residency at GlogauAIR, Yoon developed artworks and poems for her virtual exhibition. In her practice, artworks and poems act as muses for one another, emerging together through an ongoing process of making and reflection. The poems in this series have also been published in Eunoia Review.

This virtual exhibition serves as a prologue to her planned series, 숨: Breath | Breathe, which invites viewers to reflect on themselves, others, and the world—gently suggesting how one can stand separate while connected.