Grant Riven Yun

Life

Grant Riven Yun was born in 1996 and grew up in San Jose, California, in a household of artists; his parents and an aunt were professional painters and sculptors, and he drew and painted from a very young age. He went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and it was there that the digital work began, in the least likely software imaginable: his first pieces were made in Microsoft PowerPoint, overlaying and stacking shapes. It was rudimentary and it set the foundation of everything he does now. He is based in Milwaukee, works under the name Grant Yun as often as the full one, and has pursued the art alongside a medical training, qualifying as a physician. He is also a competitive breakdancer under the name Bboy Riven.

The work

He calls the style vectorised realism, and it is also described as Neo Precisionism, after the American Precisionists of the early twentieth century whose flat planes and industrial subjects it openly echoes. He has said that his work began in admiration of realist painters of the early nineteen hundreds, and that as an artist native to digital tools he felt it mattered to explore realism using the instruments of the present, making objective compositions with subjective undertones. The method is meticulous. He works from photographs, returns to the computer with a clear mental sketch, builds the image in vector software, then lays a grain texture over it. Colour is the slowest part by far, and those decisions often take longer than the drawing. The palette stays limited and muted, the lines clean, the mood still.

The subjects are deliberately ordinary: grain silos and overpasses, gas stations and truckstop diners, salt ponds and quiet suburban streets, the drive home from work, looking out of a window. He has said there is always a story to be told wherever you are, just by looking at your surroundings, and that he wants the work to offer a pause in a time of constant information, something accessible both emotionally and visually. Hockney and Hopper were early influences; more recently Georgia O'Keeffe, after a trip to New Mexico to see her studio and the country she painted. He treats the blockchain as both tool and metaphor, arguing that it documents history in real time much as painters once did, using ledgers instead of linen.

Standing

Yun has collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art and has shown internationally. His first solo exhibition, Growing Up, opened in Seoul in 2024, a minimal and personal series drawn from his own identity, made with Avant Arte. In 2025 he showed SPACES at Fellowship in London, extending the language into a meditation on memory, history and the digital tools of the era. His work was selected by the Art in Embassies programme of the United States Department of State and shown in Vilnius in 2024, where the piece recorded was En Route, a UV pigment print on Coventry Rag vellum paper. His work has also reached the Sotheby's salerooms and Paris Photo, and the studio is represented in the digital art field by galleries including Art of This Millennium and Verse.

What reaches the saleroom

Because the work is digitally native, almost everything that trades is either a token or a physical print issued from it, and edition size is what separates the registers. The Avant Arte editions are the clearest guide: En Route and Fall both sold out on release, while High Fly Over the Valley was published at a mid four figure sum in euros. That last title is precisely the work LLB Auction sold, at a hammer noticeably above the publisher's release price, which is the pattern across his sold out editions. For any lot, establish the medium exactly, since a UV pigment print, a screenprint and a tokenised work with an associated print are three different things, and confirm the edition number against the publisher's stated total.