The quiet
after the explosion
Landscapes that hold the feeling left once an event has passed.The loneliness that lingers in the space between people.
A landscape of feeling —
what remains after the event
Kim Yujin is a painter who works on the themes of emotion-laden landscapes and the loneliness within relationships. This practice begins not from the spectacle of an event but from its aftermath — the moment a thing has happened and the air has not yet settled.
The central body of work, the 〈After the Explosion〉 series, takes its premise from its own title. An explosion is the loudest of events; what interests Kim Yujin is the silence that follows it. The series asks what is left once the noise has gone — the residual feeling, the dust still hanging in the light, the strange stillness of a place that has just been changed.
In Kim Yujin's hands the landscape is never a neutral backdrop. Feeling is projected onto it: a sky, a field, a room becomes the carrier of an emotion that has no other place to go. To paint a landscape, here, is to paint the trace of what was felt there — the way a space keeps the weather of an experience long after the experience itself has ended.
Alongside this runs a second, quieter theme: the loneliness within relationships. It is not the solitude of being alone but the more particular ache of being near another and still apart — the distance that can open up inside closeness. Read together with the explosion, the two concerns describe a single attention: to the quiet that gathers after intensity, between people and within a place.
Kim Yujin is active across platforms such as Opengallery, an art rental and sales service through which these paintings circulate beyond the gallery wall and into the spaces where people live. It is a fitting channel for work so concerned with the emotional life of rooms and the quiet that fills them.
Major themes
- 1
〈After the Explosion〉
A series built on the silence after the loudest of events — the residual feeling and stillness of a place just changed.
- 2
Landscapes filled with emotion
The landscape is never neutral — sky, field, and room become carriers of a feeling that has nowhere else to go.
- 3
Loneliness in relationships
Not the solitude of being alone but the ache of being near another and still apart — the distance inside closeness.
Practice & activity
- Medium: painting. A practice centred on emotion-laden landscapes and the loneliness within relationships.
- Key series: After the Explosion — the stillness and residual feeling that remain once an event has passed.
- Active across platforms such as Opengallery, an art rental and sales service.
Three essays —
on the explosion, the landscape, and the distance between
1〈After the Explosion〉 — painting the aftermath, not the event
The title of Kim Yujin's central series tells you where the artist stands in relation to drama. Not the explosion but after the explosion: Kim Yujin arrives a beat late, when the flash is gone and only the consequence remains. The loudest moment is precisely the one the artist declines to paint.
What is an aftermath made of? Dust still suspended in the light, a ringing that has not yet faded from the ears, a place rearranged by force and not yet understood. These are quiet things, and difficult to depict — they have no clear shape, only an atmosphere. The series works at the level of that atmosphere, holding the residue of an event rather than the event itself.
There is a tenderness in this choice. To paint the explosion would be to sensationalise it; to paint its aftermath is to stay with what is left to be felt. The series treats feeling as something that outlasts its cause — a weather that settles over a place and lingers long after the thing that brought it has gone.
2A landscape that feels — emotion projected onto place
Landscape painting has often pretended to be objective — a faithful record of a place as it is. Kim Yujin's landscapes make no such claim. In this work the place is openly a vessel: it carries a feeling that belongs to no object and so must be lent to the scenery.
This is an old human reflex — to read our weather into the sky, our grief into an empty room. Kim Yujin formalises it. The emotion is not illustrated by a figure within the landscape; it is dissolved into the landscape itself, so that the whole field of the painting hums with a single feeling. There is no one to point to. The mood is the subject.
And because the aftermath is most often the subject, the feeling these landscapes carry is a quiet one — the low, persistent tone of something already passed. To stand before such a painting is to be handed an atmosphere and asked, gently, to recognise it: the way a place can hold what we felt there, and give it back to us when we look.
3The distance within closeness — loneliness in relationships
Running beneath the landscapes is a second concern that gives them their particular ache: the loneliness within relationships. This is not the loneliness of the hermit but of the person in company — the distance that can open between two people even as they sit in the same room.
It is a harder loneliness to name, because it wears the appearance of togetherness. Kim Yujin's landscapes are well suited to holding it. A scene emptied of figures, charged with feeling, becomes a portrait of that in-between space — the gap that intimacy does not always close, the quiet that can fall between people who are near.
Placed beside the explosion series, this theme completes a single picture of this attention. After the loud event comes the quiet; between two people there is a quiet too. In both, what Kim Yujin paints is the space that opens when the intensity recedes — and the feeling that gathers, patiently, to fill it.
From the silence of 〈After the Explosion〉 to the distance that opens within closeness, Kim Yujin has pursued a single attention: to the quiet that gathers once intensity recedes, in a place and between people. Kim Yujin joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that the proceeds of the work might become a low-interest lifeline for artists facing financial exclusion today.
Selected Works
1 works are featured here.
Kim Yujin joined this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists. Every work sold flows directly into the artists' mutual-aid loan fund— a purchase becomes the next month's lifeline for an artist navigating financial exclusion today.
