Knocked over, it rises —
the warmth that lifts us again

The word that gathers Yang Soon-yeol's work is motherhood— but extended, lifted out of the private and the biological. In her vocabulary, motherhood names a capacity rather than a role: the capacity to hold, to tend, to keep watch over what is fragile. To extend it is to widen the circle of what counts as worth holding, until it reaches past one's own kin toward strangers, toward objects, toward the earth itself.

She frames this widened motherhood not as sentiment but as response — a way through the crises of our age. Where the present moment tends toward separation, her work proposes recovery: the patient re-stitching of the bond between the human and the non-human, the living and the made. It is a quiet, almost devotional proposition, carried not by argument but by form.

The ottogi is the Korean roly-poly doll, weighted at its base so that however hard you push it, it rocks and rights itself. Yang takes this familiar object and makes it the protagonist of her work across painting and sculpture. In her hands it is no longer a toy but a figure for resilience: the simple, stubborn fact of standing up again.

What the 〈Ottogi〉 series adds to that fact is a question of agency — who, or what, does the lifting? Her answer folds back into the extended motherhood at the heart of her practice: the force that rights the fallen doll is the same warmth that tends and holds. The doll does not rise alone; it rises because it is held. Recovery, in this reading, is never solitary — it is relational, a matter of being kept and being raised by another.

Yang trained in Eastern painting, yet her practice refuses to settle on a single medium. Painting, sculpture, three-dimensional and time-based work all appear in her body of work — not as restlessness but as necessity. The poetic empathy she pursues is for existence and for things in general, and things are not flat. To attend to an object fully is, eventually, to give it volume, weight, a place to stand.

So the same motif crosses surfaces and forms: the 〈Ottogi〉 painted, then carved; 〈Dream〉 unfolding the inner landscape from which recovery begins; the figures of 〈Homo Sapiens〉 turning the question of what we are toward what we might tend. Whether in pigment or in mass, the work keeps asking how the life and the things of this earth might come to dwell together — a warm, meditative inquiry that treats sculpture and painting as two voices in one conversation.