YoAhn Han is a Korean painter based in Boston whose work is a visual dialogue between suppression and desire, a duality which speaks to both his experience of cerebral arteriovenous malformation and to his bifurcated cultural identity. Han received his MFA 2D at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and obtained a Bachelors of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Along with maintaining a vibrant and dedicated studio in Boston, he also teaches at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Massachusetts College of Art and Design (his alma mater) in their continuing education and MFA programs.
Han is a mixed-media artist, working primarily with materials such as watercolor, gouache, inks, and yupo (a synthetic mylar-like paper) onto painted wood panels. These collaged works, ranging in size, depict floral motifs, layered and interwoven with recognizable human forms. His work has been shown internationally throughout the U.S., the Netherlands, and South Korea - including Solo Shows at Essex Art Center, Artlery 160 gallery in Boston, Art Mora gallery in New Jersey, and Double Space in Seoul as well as Group Shows at Chase Young gallery and Distillery gallery in Boston, Prince Street gallery in New York, and Art Mora gallery in New Jersey. He has participated in the annual MassArt Auctions and the International Art Fairs of Seoul and Busan in South Korea which he continues to participate in 2023.
Between 2021 and the first half of 2022, Han has shown in the Greater Boston area - including Solo Exhibitions at Chase Young gallery, Fitchburg Art Museum alongside Group Shows as MassArt x SoWa gallery, the University Hall gallery at UMass Boston, and Fort Point Art Community gallery. In the second half of the year, he has continued paving his professional career with his well-received, new artwork featured internationally at several places - a Summer Group Show at Chase Young gallery in Boston, a two-person show at Studio Artego in New York, Art Market Hamptons, and K-Art Fair in Seoul. The experience of the exhibits have inspired him to embrace his figurative and floral motifs more actively. This will inhabit a stronger interwoven shape of botanical and figurative moments and stands him apart from his peers. Han believes the combination of the two motifs in a piece of work will be an alluring invitation to the hypothetical space that he envisions at his upcoming Solo Show at Chase Young gallery in March 2023.
- Artist Statement -
I live between identities. Bound by Confucianism and Christianity, my hands cut into materials to show the exquisite space that I inhabit—an environment that simultaneously invites one to consider desire and uncertainty while also resisting sleekness. I am talking about seeing skin deep as a sensation not just a surface. This exaggerated perspective, the privileging of bodily awareness over reasoning, directs my obsessions with the body's internal and external beauty. Its abjectness and also its splendor.
In my studio, I marry laborious, repetitive excision work, the cutting away of forms within forms, with color applications that rely on the slow metamorphosis of a wet surface turning dry. The ordinary drying of the painted material results in something sublime, referencing bodily shapes that are not quite identifiable. The production of work at rates that transition from fast to slow, from thoughtful to instinctive, of bringing together meanings and ideas from different places, allow my paintings to serve as record of my “in-between” identity.
