Featured work: She Looks
YuTung Ko (b. 1999, Taiwan)
YuTung Ko is an emerging artist who has attracted growing attention in recent years. A graduate of the Department of Fine Arts at Tunghai University, she works primarily in glue-color painting (jiao-cai) and mixed media, developing a visual language that is both material and conceptual. Through mineral pigments, metal leaf and densely layered surfaces, she constructs ambiguous spaces between body, memory and time, where delicacy and erosion, softness and hardness coexist.
Her practice focuses on the female body, the construction of identity and the limits of language in describing inner experience. Rather than treating “woman” as a single, fixed symbol, she adopts an anatomical gaze, separating the body into layers of bone, flesh and skin that correspond to psychological, mnemonic and social structures. Uniforms, ornament and skin become key motifs, pointing to external norms while suggesting how individuals negotiate and resist within them.
Ko is also concerned with systems of language and naming, particularly historical classifications of women’s emotions and behavior — such as “hysteria” — that reduce complex experience to symptoms. She translates these oppressive structures into images charged with tension: calm yet unstable, silent yet persistently speaking. Recurring dolls, blank expressions and ritual poses form a presence suspended between self-awareness and being looked at.
In her use of materials, she emphasizes the accumulation of time. Structures resembling coral — forms built up layer by layer — serve as a central metaphor: the present rests upon the residue of the past, and life and death, growth and weathering coexist on the same surface. Recent works extend to themes of action and ways of being, such as declaration, migration and witness, asking how individuals choose to act after understanding — and in doing so declare who they are.
Ko has held solo exhibitions across Taiwan and participated in art fairs and international group exhibitions including One Art Taipei, establishing a distinctive presence in contemporary glue-color painting and mixed media.
IG @koyutung.art