Untitled Art Houston: Kevin Yaun

Kevin Yaun's practice begins outside. He moves through Southern California neighborhoods and landscapes collecting visual material, sometimes making plein air studies before bringing his observations into the studio, where they are combined, compressed, and reimagined. He works on surfaces that occasionally incorporate canvas drop cloth and other found materials, sometimes enclosing the paintings within frames that have also been handmade by the artist. The resulting works are painted with what he describes as a sense of urgent optimism, a response to what he sees as a collective home in a state of slow, unacknowledged crisis.

This tension runs through the Inside Outside series, in which atmospheric landscapes press up against the geometry of window frames and architectural planes. The windows in these paintings are rarely transparent; instead, they function almost like mirrors, turning the landscape back on itself and folding the viewer's own position into the image. The boundary between interior and exterior becomes unstable throughout the exhibition, a threshold that the eye crosses and recrosses without resolution.

"In this body of work," he writes, "I use devices like layers of glass and distortion to echo the surreal connection I have with the interior after many years of travel and moving around."

Feelings of the sublime are a theme throughout this body of work. Paintings like Doom & Bloom, Study of a Power Line, and Lamp Post, Monterey Park strip the landscape down to single, solitary forms like a utility pole, a street lamp, or a wind-bent tree, silhouetted against saturated skies. These images carry the emotional syntax of the romantic sublime while remaining rooted in the ordinary infrastructure of contemporary Southern California life. He asks: "What if home wasn't a shining set of shapes capping a hill, but an interconnected piece of the ecosystem?"

Yaun was born in Lawrenceville, Georgia in 1986 and has lived and worked across the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. He received his MFA from Laguna College of Art and Design in 2024 and is based in Los Angeles. Previous solo exhibitions include Billis Willis Gallery, Los Angeles, and Galerie Ego, Marfa. Slow Burn is his first solo exhibition with Megan Mulrooney.