Byun Mi Young

Exhibition Introduction

A real-world neo-utopia by Byun Mi Young

This exhibition combines the formal beauty of monumental urban architecture with the aesthetics of traditional landscape painting, exploring a utopia grounded in reality rather than confined to nature.

In particular, the straight lines of the city contrast with the flowing lines of the landscape. Superimposed in dozens of layers, they evoke the modern forms of buildings.

Through neo-landscapes that bring together real buildings and imagined structures from the artist’s utopia, visitors can discover new artistic possibilities and take time to contemplate an ideal world within reality.

작가 소개

Byun Mi Young approaches landscape not simply as a representation of nature, but as a psychological and imaginary space in which one may dwell.

By repeatedly layering pigments and carving back into the painted surface, she reveals traces of colors buried beneath. Each exposed layer carries a different moment of the painting’s making, transforming the surface into a landscape accumulated through time.

Developed through her long-running Yusansu (遊山水) series and more recently expanded into Time Scape, her work brings together the spirit of traditional East Asian landscape painting, contemporary materials, and the physical process of accumulation and erasure.

Mountains, flowers, butterflies and phoenixes inhabit this imagined landscape. Among them, the phoenix gradually emerges not only as an auspicious symbol, but also as a persona moving freely through the artist’s own utopian world.

In Byun’s paintings, landscape ultimately becomes a scape of time—a place where memory, labor, imagination and accumulated layers coexist.

변미영 | Byun Mi Young — Profile

• Graduated from the Department of Painting, College of Fine Arts, Keimyung University
• Graduated from the Graduate School of Keimyung University
• Ph.D. in Plastic Arts, Graduate School of Daegu University