Born in 1988 in Pingtung, Taiwan, Yun lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. The artist received an MFA from Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK, and a BFA in 2D Fine Arts Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, and completed a semester at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2025), Trustman Art Gallery, Boston (2025), and Boston Sculptors Gallery (2025). Yun is the recipient of the Walter Feldman Fellowship (2023) and the Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation (2024), and has completed residencies at MASS MoCA and the Boston Center for the Arts.
Artist Statement
My work uses humor, beauty, and surreal imagery to examine power and privilege in contemporary U.S. culture. The two-part series Rage & Ecstasy interrogates the viral “Karen” phenomenon, public behavior captured and circulated online, understanding the Karen icon as a figure shaped by histories of domination, conquest, and imperialism. These performances unfold within everyday sites of consumer capitalism, where extraction, labor, and surveillance structure public life. By imagining myself as “Karen,” I examine how aggression and racialized privilege circulate within these systems, transforming spectacle into critical reflection on desire, femininity, capitalism, and collective complicity. Painting becomes a space to hold tension between absurdity and violence, exposure and power, while opening a path toward embodied transformation.
My current work extends from Rage & Ecstasy in search of an aesthetic that overcomes fear. As viral spectacle and artificial intelligence accelerate disembodiment, circulating images detached from touch and consequence, beading becomes a deliberate counter movement. It is an ancient technology rooted in the body: repetitive, tactile, and time bound. Against the speed of extraction, beading insists on slowness, contact, and interdependence.
I think about how we live through screens, touching glass illuminated by a devotional glow like stained glass casting blue light across a church. We search our phones for something beyond ourselves. In contrast, beads are glass that hold and reflect light from the outside world. Threaded together, they form sculptural drawings in space, embodying an egalitarian structure in which the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Through this embodied practice, I seek to transform rage into ecstasy, spectacle into presence, and isolation into collective form.