BIOGRAPHY :
Bonae Yi is a Korean artist based between Glasgow, UK, and Yeoju, South Korea. She holds an MFA from The Glasgow School of Art (2026) and an MFA from Hongik University, Seoul (2023). Before developing her artistic practice, she spent 22 years in the electronics industry, including 18 years in TV marketing and product planning.
Her practice combines painting and material experimentation to investigate the relationship between digital images, light, perception, and physical material. Working across vinyl, textiles, pigment, and mixed media, she explores how screen-based qualities can be translated into material surfaces. Art became a space where she could explore these questions on her own terms.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My practice begins with the sensory qualities of the digital screen, particularly its transparency, smoothness, and luminosity.
For more than two decades, I worked in the digital display industry, witnessing the rapid replacement of analogue media by digital screens. I watched photographs, printed images, television, and other forms of visual media increasingly converge into a single luminous surface. This transformation led me to reflect on what happens to images, and to our experience of them, when different analogue forms are absorbed into the screen.
Digital images have always felt strangely transparent and weightless to me, almost ghost-like. Through painting, I realised that the physical world is fundamentally opaque. This difference made me aware of two ways in which light exists: digital screens generate images through emitted light, while physical objects absorb, reflect, and scatter light through their material surfaces.
This tension between the luminous image and the physical world became a starting point for my practice. I initially explored the sensory qualities of the screen through transparent vinyl, drawn to its ability to appear weightless and luminous while remaining a solid physical material. Through cutting, staining, stitching, layering, and accumulation, I introduced texture, irregularity, and traces of touch into surfaces designed to recall the seamlessness of digital images.
My investigation has since expanded into a deeper exploration of materiality and light. I continue to work with transparent, solid surfaces while experimenting with materials and processes that introduce texture, thickness, resistance, and duration. Subtle changes in light — through reflection, scattering, and transmission — reveal residues, shadows, and variations that cannot exist within a digital image.
For me, light is not simply a means of making images visible; it is a condition through which material, time, and space become perceptible. Painting becomes a place where these elements meet, allowing the flat surface to hold both the visual qualities of the screen and the physical traces of its making.
Ultimately, my practice asks how, in an age shaped by digital screens, we continue to experience, remember, and exist as material beings.