New York, NY — A Space Gallery is pleased to present Airless Lullaby, a solo exhibition by Yooyeon Nam. Working in oil painting, Nam constructs a psychological space in which breath becomes conceptual absence, a vacuum where emotion accumulates without release. Through saturated color, volatile gesture, and an unsettling stillness, the exhibition positions the figure as both subject and threshold: a site where tenderness, anxiety, and estrangement collide.
At the center of the exhibition is Nam’s recurring cast of round-faced, nose-less characters, figures defined by their insistence on being seen. Often depicted alone or in pairs, the compositions compress narrative into proximity, bringing viewers into an unblinking encounter with presence. The “Airless” do not perform emotion; they contain it, generating tension between surface sweetness and latent threat. Hands reach tentatively, bodies lean inward, and gestures oscillate between care and harm, dissolving the boundary between intimacy and violence.
Nam’s paintings sustain a striking contradiction between turbulence and quiet. While the figures appear suspended almost icon-like, the environments behind them erupt into swirling chromatic storms. This is not backdrop but pressure: a world in agitation rendered eerily silent. In the exhibition’s vacuum, there is no air to carry sound—no scream, no comfort, no resolution. The result is a sustained unease, where the viewer confronts not spectacle but contained intensity, not narrative closure but a silence that refuses relief.
Formally and conceptually, Nam’s figures draw from the intentional anatomical shifts of traditional Korean Buddha sculptures that are idealized, believable, yet deliberately distorted. Her simplified facial structures and unconventional eyes carry the weight of cultural translation, referencing social contexts in which direct eye contact and overt emotional display may be read as impolite, while exposing the heightened friction of Western environments that demand legibility. Here, estrangement is not merely represented; it becomes a structural condition of the image itself.
In Airless Lullaby, the lullaby functions less as sound than as gesture: a form of care offered even when it cannot be received. These paintings do not ask to be decoded, they ask to be witnessed. The exhibition invites viewers into sustained proximity with figures that cannot breathe, cannot scream, cannot be soothed, yet remain unmistakably alive within the storm of their own silence.
