Miyeon Yi

Long Story Short is pleased to present Holding on to Gravity, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Miyeon Yi. Known for her intimate paintings set within reclaimed wooden objects, Yi transforms drawers, cupboards, and spirit tablets into sites of quiet encounter—spaces where memory, gesture, and loss unfold through touch as much as through sight.

Working primarily in egg tempera on wood, Yi constructs delicate narratives that oscillate between the seen and unseen. Each work begins with an object once used to contain or commemorate—aged drawers, toy boxes, devotional frames—carrying traces of prior hands and past lives. Within these vessels, her painted figures reach, kneel, or look toward those who are absent. Some scenes invite viewers to lift, slide, or open panels, activating the work through the same tactile motion that defines its making. Through these gestures, Yi suggests that remembrance is not fixed in image but performed—an act of holding and releasing, of dwelling beside what has vanished.

The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of intimate tableaux. In "Tracing the Age of a Tree," a child studies the rings of a fallen trunk as if counting time itself; in "Schrödinger's Cat," the quiet uncertainty of presence and absence plays out behind the hinged doors of a small cabinet. Works such as "Erasing You is Erasing Me" and "Exit Stage Left" extend Yi's fascination with theatrical space—figures poised between thresholds, gestures suspended as if awaiting their cue. Elsewhere, in "My No. 18," a soft glow of color and sound mingles with the atmosphere of a karaoke room, blurring the edges of memory, illusion, and light.

The artist incorporates found furniture or toy forms—a wooden bear, a domestic drawer—bridging the worlds of childhood and ritual. The small acts of opening and closing, of revealing and concealing, carry a rhythm of care. Within these hand-built theaters, Yi asks what it means to keep something close when it no longer has form—to remember not through image, but through touch, presence, and tenderness.

Yi's practice reflects a sustained interest in film, theatre, and the ceremonial. Influenced by Noh stage design and the ways performance delineates visible and hidden realms, she often divides pictorial space into "onstage" and "offstage" layers. This formal structure mirrors the emotional registers of her subjects: what is withheld, what is remembered, what trembles at the edge of disappearance. Her painted worlds feel suspended between gesture and afterimage, between the intimacy of ritual and the poetics of memory.

Born in Seoul and based in London, Miyeon Yi (b. 1995) received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent exhibitions include Domestic Flights (Frestonian Gallery, London, 2025), Buzz~ Buzz~ Buzz~ (Linseed Projects, Shanghai, 2024), and Asia Now (Mou Projects, Paris, 2024). She is a finalist for the 2025 Sovereign Asian Art Prize.