As Junkhouse, Korean painter and street artist Su Young brightens up the city landscape and gallery walls with a distinct, deceptively cute comics-derived style of malleable characters.
With colorful bodies either alone or fused and crowding the eye’s attention, they radiate their vibrant, playful mood in exhibitions or spots all over her native Seoul, South Korea. While many appear to be vaguely humanoid or some kind of gelatinous fauna, her later work especially embraces anthropomorphized abstractions—the culmination of the fluid geometrical lines of what she calls, “Organicism.”
Her imaginings of new life-forms taking shape out of inorganic objects—the root of Organicism and her primary inspiration—reflect not only an inner life of the city, but also its interconnectedness. Young perceives the city as one giant organism, constantly evolving, moving and metamorphizing in its most basic of quests: survival. With her favored materials of acrylics and markers sometimes augmented by plastic tape or electric wire, she gives all of the parts that make up the city—however small, like bits or torn cardboard or even a discarded toilet seat—character and personality a teeming, bright, cheerful liveliness. Seeing her work is surely a mark of a city in good health.
