Brooklyn-based painter Justin Yoon invites viewers into a surreal, melancholic dreamscape—a realm where hyper-stylized characters navigate themes of queer selfhood, cultural hybridity, and introspective nostalgia. Born in Los Angeles and raised in both LA and Bundang, South Korea, Yoon draws from a life steeped in contrasts: late-night Hollywood movies, jazz-filled family drives, and the bittersweet yearning of his queer adolescence.
His richly detailed paintings depict recurring characters inhabiting a synthetic, dreamlike world, blending the nostalgic warmth of old sitcoms with the audacious glamour of queer Asian idolatry. For his SOLO debut with Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery at the 2025 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Yoon builds on these themes, immersing his characters in a grand, swanky party that echoes the escapist opulence of 1930s cinema. The Art Momentum spoke to Yoon about the poignant reflection on belonging, transience, and resilience that lies beneath the layers of campy humour in his work.
Your art often explores themes of queerness, intersecting cultural identities, and personal history. How do these elements shape your creative process and the narratives you build in your work?
In the opening scene of Richard Linklater’s movie, Before Sunset, the main character, Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, is doing a book tour for his semi-autobiographical novel. He mentions this little quote by the author, Thomas Wolfe: “We are the sum of all the moments of our lives.”
This quote always stayed with me, not only because this movie had a big impact on me growing up, but because I felt that it explained my deep love and connection to the creation of art, whatever form it may take. As a gay kid growing up in Korea after moving from Los Angeles with my family at age 6, I always felt as if my life was filled with melancholy, loneliness, and yearning. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that, in the grand scheme of things, it was insignificant and terribly mediocre.
I didn’t have any dramatic hardship in my childhood and teen-hood. My family was supportive and loving and always encouraged my weirdness and imagination. However, I still had this deeply disconnected feeling of trying to understand my queerness or my desire to find and digest stories, characters, and very specific imagery and colours—which led me to create those myself.
Even after I moved to New York at age 18 and started to experience more diverse cultures and friends that aligned with my own interests, I felt as though my life was not worthy of something special like the stories I saw in movies or paintings. However, as I created my own world over time, with my characters and narratives and colours, I realized that I was doing just what Jesse and Thomas Wolfe were saying—I am the sum of all the moments of my life: my gayness, my friends, my family, little moments, passing through time in life, all coming together in my work.
I’m still in the process of understanding what life is and what all I do is, as that will never end until the last moment. In the meantime, all of these moments in my life have been and will be the core element that makes up the entirety of my work, my story.
I [had] this deeply disconnected feeling of trying to understand my queerness or my desire to find and digest stories, characters, and very specific imagery and colours—which led me to create those myself.
How do you define “play” in your artistic practice, and how does it influence the themes or techniques you choose to explore in your work?
In my artistic process, everything is “play,” as I treat it like a world-building or story-writing process. I do loose sketches and small writings here and there to form an idea, a scene—similar to setting up a movie scene in my head. I approach all my work as if I’m creating a moment, capturing a feeling of these moments in time, not too far from how a graphic novelist would plan a scene and sketch it out.
I approach it loosely though. The imagery arrives slowly as I work more and more on the surface of the canvas or paper. The story of the scene finds itself during this process, which is play-like in a way, as in rehearsing an actual stage play.
You have been creating new works for your debut at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair in South Africa. How did you approach this new body of work, and what message or narrative would you like the audience there to take away from it?
Last year, I felt as if I was in a transitional period with a lot of odd mind spaces. With the world on fire and everyday life moving along, I escaped into old movies, especially 1930s ones where the escapism was extremely pronounced, with all the glamour and slapstick comedy while the bleak backdrop of that time loomed underneath.
After watching a string of Mae West movies (whom I adore), I wanted to explore the undeniable hopeless feeling of the doom days, and how we cope with it with escapist campy humour and glamour. Especially for us Queer people, fighting the doom and gloom with irreverent irony and comedy is core to our existence, as life itself is so transient, and being present reminds all of us of that. My characters and their world are still going on, but in this story, they are now at a big party; a swanky, timeless, glamorous, anonymous space that they are all somewhat disengaged in, yet can’t escape.
I wanted to create a theatre of glamour where they don’t belong, although in truth, they do, whether they want to agree to it or not. In a way, it is my contrarian approach to a liminal space—a space that is so glamorous and romantic, but without a core meaning. They are there because they are, and that is okay for now. They will move on to another party, another space, or the next morning somehow, and the story will continue.
These interviews were conducted with artists participating in the SOLO section of the 2025 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.