An art-loving New York City resident can be no stranger to renditions of urban life. At their best, such paintings immerse the senses in the exuberant energy of a metropolis that attracts myriad tourists and dream seekers to bask in its rambunctious vivacity. In fact, one may be so inured to this universal narrative that it has become difficult to discover anything new, and one ought to be forgiven for sometimes equating this genre with hotel art – prints of cliched compositions mass-produced and available at a mouse click on Amazon.com. Is the painting investigating the urban condition dead? Not so, argues the youthful Korean-born artist and New York resident Yang Si Young. His newest show at the Kate Oh Gallery on Madison Ave, brimming with faces he's encountered in the city as well as the world stage, represents an intelligent study of urban mysteries.

In Yang's paintings, colours are earthy yet never static; lines radiate elliptical, sprawling, yet never chaotic. Raucous brushstrokes and delicate contours collide to produce compositions that are purposefully made to appear unplanned, even incomplete. They hail squarely from the tradition of folk art rather than pop art. To be clear, these paintings are not of buildings and bridges, not skylines or iconic statues. These constitute intimate portraits of subway riders and street people, of Manhattan strangers and studio models. Even images of billboard faces are rendered in such a down-to-earth style as if they evoke someone you know, someone you've passed by looking out from the bus, gently revealing the urban condition from the inside. They eschew the intensity of a dog-eat-dog urban existence, something that is too familiar, for a personalized and organic grammar based on curiosity and respect. You may peer at the same composition for a while and still not have quite figured out the precise interior world these faces represent: they provoke questions rather than provide answers. And, before long, a rather fantastical realization will arrive: you're looking through a different pair of eyes than your own.

Yang is very open about the distinctiveness of his eyes. On his website, the Gen-Z artist confides that he was diagnosed with autism and developmental disabilities, and while unable to speak even when he was five years old, he nonetheless started painting at that age. Facing a significant language barrier, any child would struggle with relating to others and having others relate to them. Yang struggled with finding his own identity in a society where being who you are is not always taken for granted. Making art, and using his eyes, was, therefore, the spiritual salvation he found in a world dominated by language. The silent faces of his paintings indeed seem to speak not words relating to our daily experience or sentences expressing common meaning, but a syntax of its own fashioning and of its own reality, which despite its ghostly and even hermetic appearance we can listen to keenly because the sounds of this language are delightfully relatable. It is therefore quite apt that Yang calls himself a “heartism artist.” This peculiar word, likely a neologism, immediately conjures up an interior world of intimate nature. And although we may not know the precise meaning of this new ism, we can appreciate its delicate insinuations, its invitation for us to find relationships between us and the people in the paintings, and to reexamine common identities with fresh eyes. In an attempt to illuminate heartism, the critic Jun-Seok Jang from the Korean Art Criticism Research Director writes that Yang's world seems to be “composed of multiple relationships with life, death, delight, pleasure, beyond the aesthetic phenomenon built from the relation between artist and objects. He visualizes the inspiration, which he felt [...] before drawing a picture, into a formative image by re-illuminating through his inner mind.”

To peer through the oblique window Yang has provided us is to probe the faces and relationships we've always taken for granted. Common faces that pass us by fleetingly reemerge as charming apparitions that flicker with strange rhythms, as uncanny traces of people we wish we knew.

Images one glimpses on billboards and walls suddenly intrigue us not because they are cliched and humorous but because they look like images transformed into real people captured by keen eyes. In an urban world, where everyone seems to struggle with maintaining their identities, these paintings hint at the opposite: finding a new identity may be easier than keeping your old self.

About the Critic

Benji Su Alexander is an art historian and curator. He has contributed essays and/or curatorial advice for Jenny Holzer, Frieze New York, The Armory Show, and Skira Editore. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and is a published poet.