Kyung Youl Yoon (b. 1947) is a Korean American artist, currently dedicating his practice to the ‘Cubic Inception’ series of sculptural paintings. Cubic Inception began as a response both to global climate change and to the alienation of contemporary urban life. He began adding sculptural elements to his paintings to '“break the indifference of onlookers,” as he has written, “to create an exchange where the viewer begins to reflect on a new thought or idea that eliminates obscurity in the forms and creates personal meaning.” The individual pieces become a large matrix of cubes forming a collection of ideas. Each cubic piece takes the place of a brushstroke. Each edge takes the place of a line. The resulting masses of shapes suggest aerial views of industrial landscapes, articulated topographies of beautiful but implicitly hostile environments. The Cubic Inception paintings brim with both metaphorical resonance and tactile allure. Los Angeles-based critic and curator, Peter Frank, notes that the Cubic Inception paintings “extend Yoon’s painterly practice into sculpture, into a low relief of a kind that cannot logically be derived from painting.
Yoon studies at the University of Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain and held numerous exhibitions in the United States, Korea, China, and Spain since the 1980s, including the Shanghai Li Haisu Museum, Public Naeseorak Art Museum Korea, Seoul Arts Center, Madrid National University of Spain, Queens Museum, and the Art Gallery at the Rockefeller State Park Preserve. In 2015, Yoon, held a solo exhibition titled “Journey” at the United Gallery in Korea, and he was also invited to exhibit his works at Encounter Korea at the Southern Utah Museum of Art (SUMA) and the Project of First Encounter at the Korean Culture Center in Los Angeles, California. Notably, his recent works were shown in a solo exhibition at the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery. He is also represented by the Donghwa Ode Gallery, through which he participated in the Art New York/Art Miami/Aspen/Art Palm Springs Art Fairs, and Hamptons Art Fair. He also exhibited at the Passion Connected 100 x 100 - Pyeong Chang Olympic 2018 Event, the Asia Week Special Exhibition, A Wave of Peace from the World Korean Cultural Center in New York, and many other venues.