Upcoming Solo Exhibition
Yoo Hyun Mi: The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come) 31.10.2026 — 12.12.2026
Information
Event upcoming
31 Oct – 12 Dec 2026
About The Exhibition
STPI presents Yoo Hyun Mi: The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come), the latest chapter in the artist's long-running The Blank Puzzle project (1998 – present), dedicated to the idea that blankness itself can hold meaning. Marking the first presentation of The Blank Puzzle at this scale in Southeast Asia, the exhibition revisits and expands the landmark series’ enduring exploration of materiality, perception, and the subconscious, at a significant inflection point for the influence of Korean artists globally.
An established figure in Korea’s contemporary art scene, Yoo’s practice moves fluidly between sculpture, painting and photography – transporting audiences into her subtle yet limitless world of blankness. Resonant with Korea’s defining Dansaekhwa movement and challenging traditional artistic conventions with her minimalist approach, Yoo collapses boundaries between the real and imagined, the open-ended and the predetermined.
The exhibition follows Yoo’s residencies at STPI over the past three years, with explorations of new forms and material directions in print and papermaking. Pioneering and experimenting with a range of new mediums and techniques in collaboration with STPI’s world-renowned Workshop, The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come) marks a significant chapter in a body of work that has evolved over nearly three decades.
In Korean aesthetics, blankness is never truly empty. It holds subtle tones, breath, atmosphere and time. I feel this connects deeply to Korean Dansaekhwa, the materiality of white porcelain, and the concept of empty space in East Asian painting. In these traditions, emptiness is not absence, but potential. At STPI, I have been able to explore how this sense of possibility can take new form through the materiality of print and paper.
Woven into the exhibition’s narrative are the origins of The Blank Puzzle, in which a chance encounter while assembling a jigsaw with her son sparked the foundational elements of Yoo’s multidisciplinary body of work. For the artist, the pictured side of a puzzle piece represents consciousness, while the blank reverse is the structure of the subconscious.
At the heart of the exhibition, STPI has specially constructed a room within a room to present works from Yoo’s A Perfect Duet series, creating an interplay between two- and three-dimensional interpretations of works on paper. A reflective space that allows for a more intimate viewing experience, visitors are invited into the inner world of The Blank Puzzle, being drawn deeper into the characters, forms and relationships that emerge from her work.
An onsite reading room will house copies of Yoo’s short story, in which the protagonist Blank personifies The Blank Puzzle’s message in the search for their ‘bigger picture’, as well as a new catalogue produced by STPI encompassing the artist’s latest body of work, contextualised alongside a selection of pieces from previous series.
Playing with colour, volume and shape, works across the Flying Carpet, The Puzzler, and One or Two series unfold across the exhibition, demonstrating Yoo’s versatile practice – from configuring kaleidoscopic puzzle pieces that challenge the notion of a singular image, to layering handmade paper into dense, wood-like forms that blur the boundaries between image and object.
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About the artist
Yoo Hyun Mi
Residencies in 2023, 2024, 2025
Yoo Hyun Mi (1964, born and based in Seoul, South Korea) combines techniques across sculpture, painting and photography, often merging them into the same composition to challenge our perception of depth and dimension, real and reproduced. These interdisciplinary images arise from her interest in reinterpreting classic categories of art, and are informed by influences such as Freudian psychology, the female body, mysticism and symbols in traditional Korean painting.
As a fervent writer, Yoo begins by relating her stories to pictorial ideas. In renowned works such as the series Still Life (2008) and Cosmos (2013), elements in her writings are translated into curious arrangements of objects that are meticulously painted, then photographed. These objects range from rocks and animals to furniture and floating numbers. By repeatedly casting the image into different realms of representation, Yoo layers it with a spatial and textural quality that is at once familiar and otherworldly.
Yoo obtained her BFA from Seoul National University in 1987, and her MFA from New York University in 1992. Her work is in major collections including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art; and Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul.
Notable solo exhibitions include Soft Chaos (2022), Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul; Eyes of number (2017), Savina Museum, Seoul; and The library in my mind (2016), Kyobo Art Space, Seoul. The artist has also participated in major international festivals including We are from somewhere, but where are we going? (2016), 6th Daegu Photo Biennale; 15th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh (2012); and MADE UP (2008), 5th Liverpool Biennial.
Yoo had three residencies at the STPI Workshop in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
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