Mutant Lab

The Hole is proud to present Mutant Lab, the first New York solo exhibition by Korean artist Younguk Yi, whose unsettling repetitions and smooth verisimilitude have made him one of the most distinctive emerging painters. Yi’s canvases look like portraits from a hallucination—or a lab report. Figures proliferate, double and splice together, their limbs and faces recombining into new anatomies. In place of a stable body we find humans and animals mid-mutation: eyes stack like windows, torsos scaffold upward as flesh becomes architecture. The white backgrounds, raw and unpainted, provide "containment" like the fluorescent void of an exam room where the body is subjected to inspection, a space of regulation and surveillance disguised as neutrality. Trained in Seoul, Yi approaches painting through reiteration and distortion to test what painting can reveal once the image begins to break down. His airbrush provides pigment suspended in air, dispersed by pressure, forming shapes that hover between solidity and vapor. It trades in calibration, chance and breath and is, to the artist, "a philosophical choice." These whisper-thin gradients are then edged by hand in oil with ghostly precision, making the paintings at first appear digital. If I hadn’t seen his geometrically-precise drawings and extensive anatomical sketching, I wouldn’t know how he was able to create works like this. Yi builds compositions from collapsing scaffolds and fragile grids—visual echoes of Korea’s accelerated modernization and the instability it leaves behind. The body becomes a building in a system of strain and support. These painted architectures recall both the optimism and the failures of modern progress: the scaffolding of ambition, the memory of disaster, and the quiet fear of things needing maintenance and repair. Themes in this show unfold across thirty paintings in four zones: the front gallery filled with yawning figures, the rear with wrestlers and referees locked in struggle, a small side room devoted entirely to dogs, and the large green “lab” where new experiments take shape. A dark humor haunts these scenes: the painting titles circle ideas of obedience and training, choreography and competition, power and artifice. They puncture solemnity—Portrait of one who pretends to listen while secretly worrying when the conversation will end or Portrait of someone forcing a faint smile while hiding the envy at a friend’s success—turning existential unease into wry self-awareness. Taken together in this Mutant Lab, these rooms form a kind of behavioral study: a world in which every gesture, impulse and repetition becomes data. If these works carry a hint of science fiction, it’s not because they depict another world, but because they expose how mysterious our own is. They suggest parallel realities or biotech mutations, yet their real subject is human nature—the tangle of emotion, imitation, and desire that shapes our behavior. As the titles imply, Yi’s repetitions probe the “unknowability of the other.” His figures multiply like frames in a time-lapse, a kind of psychological Cubism where dilation replaces motion and emotion finds form. The proliferation of bodies provides a surplus of “body language,” yet even with this abundance of gesture, the inner world remains hidden. Behind the many “windows” of the eyes, each of our "buildings" is sealed off; surrounded by others, we remain unknowable to one another. Younguk Yi (b. 1991) lives and works in Seoul, Korea. He graduated from Dankook University, Department of Western Studies, and completed his MFA and PhD programs at Hongik University, Department of Painting. Recent solo exhibitions include Deformation of the Frame, OCI Museum of Art, Seoul (2024); When the remote control did not work, the drone crashed to the floor, Art Centre Art Moment, Seoul (2023); and A Fragment Thrown Up by a Dumped Image, Rund Gallery, Seoul (2022). Following Yi’s inclusion in a group show with us this spring, we are delighted to present the artist’s stateside solo debut. Special thanks to Yi’s Korean gallery WWNN for their thoughtful collaboration and assistance with this exhibition. We would also like to thank Kim Min-kyung and the artist himself for their thoughtful texts about this body of work, which will be available at the exhibition.