Yoon Hyup

Lines, dots and a skateboard

Yoon Hyup was born in Seoul in 1982 and lives and works in Brooklyn. He studied violin as a child and went to college intending to design skateboards, then found painting and stayed with it. Skate culture and hip hop shaped him early, and both are still legible in the work: he has said that the movement of a board across flat ground is like drawing a line on a canvas.

His method took shape in the early two thousands, when he was making large murals and painting live on stage in Seoul alongside DJs playing hip hop. Painting in public, in real time, against music, he needed marks he could make quickly and repeat, and he arrived at lines and dots. He does not sketch on the canvas. If he makes a rough drawing beforehand he does not expect the finished picture to resemble it, and he compares the process to jazz, which has a plan but is played impromptu.

The city as a field of marks

The paintings read at a distance as blurred skylines, harbours or beach fronts, and resolve close up into precisely placed abstract marks in bright, flat acrylic. Nothing is depicted in the ordinary sense: the subject is the rhythm and the ambient feeling of a particular place rather than its architecture. He works with brushes, spray cans, paint markers and graphics software, and moves between studio canvases, walls and public projects without changing the vocabulary. He has named Jean Michel Basquiat, Nam June Paik and the musician DJ Krush among his points of reference.

Galleries, walls and brands

He has shown in New York, London, Seoul, Milan, Tokyo, Miami, Hong Kong, Shanghai, San Francisco and San Sebastian. StolenSpace in London gave him a solo show, Kaleidoscope, in 2020, followed by a second, Light and Shadow, in 2022, built around his daily movement through the city and the play of light and shade across it; the gallery included him again in a group editions show in 2024. He is also carried by GR Gallery in New York and by St. Art Gallery in the Netherlands. Alongside the gallery work he has made murals and public projects and has collaborated with Dior, Tiffany, Nike, Maison Kitsune, Uniqlo, HUF, Medicom, Cinelli and Universal Music, which is how a great many people first encounter the imagery.

What a specialist examines

The output divides into unique acrylic paintings on canvas, wall and mural work that cannot be traded, and editions on paper. Because the marks are made freehand and at speed, no two paintings repeat, and scale and density are the main drivers of value within the unique work: a large, densely worked canvas is a substantially different proposition from a small sparse one. For editions a specialist records the technique, whether screenprint or another process, the edition size, the impression number and the pencil signature, and checks the sheet for handling creases, since flat expanses of a single colour show damage readily. Provenance from one of the representing galleries is worth establishing, and documentation from the publisher or the representing gallery is the ordinary expectation on an edition. The works seen at this house have been a silkscreen and a print, which sit in the editioned tier rather than among the unique canvases.