BIOGRAPHY :
Bonae Yi is a Korean artist based in Glasgow and Yeoju, South Korea. She completed her MFA in Painting at the Glasgow School of Art in 2026, following a 20-year career in television and digital media. Working closely with screens led her to question how light, colour, and images shape perception and emotion. 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 and smoothness. For more than twenty years, I worked in the production and planning of digital displays, witnessing the rapid replacement of analogue media by digital screens. This transformation led me to reflect on how digital technologies shape the ways we experience, perceive, and remember the world.
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 revealed 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.
My investigation of transparency and smoothness expanded into an exploration of light. For me, light is not simply a means of making images visible; it is the condition through which material, time, and space become perceptible.
My work developed from this observation. One direction translates the structure of the digital screen into painting through transparent supports that allow light to pass through. Rather than reproducing the seamlessness of digital images, unpredictable material reactions reveal resistance, residue, and the accumulation of time. Another direction explores how light remains and accumulates within layered materials through repetition, chance, and duration.
Ultimately, my practice asks how, in an age shaped by digital screens, we continue to experience, remember, and exist as material beings. For me, painting is a place where light, material, and time meet, keeping that question open.
Contact. : bonae.qwer@gmail.com