# Spencer Brownstone Gallery

> 1 upcoming show at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in Downtown NYC, including “Youjin Yi: FEEEL”. Showtimes, tickets, and directions.

- Section: [NYC Art Galleries](https://bronder.nyc/gallery/index.html.md)
- Address: 170-A Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002 ([Google Maps](https://www.google.com/maps/search/?api=1&query=170-A+Suffolk+Street%2C+New+York%2C+NY+10002))
- Neighborhood: Downtown
- Web page: https://bronder.nyc/gallery/galleries/spencer_brownstone_gallery.html
- Markdown: https://bronder.nyc/gallery/galleries/spencer_brownstone_gallery.html.md
- Last updated: Nov 04, 2026 at 10:27 AM

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## Youjin Yi: FEEEL

- When: Opening reception Tue Nov 10 at 6 PM · Opens Nov 10, on view through Jan 09, 2027
- Run: Nov 10, 2026 – Jan 09, 2027
- Source: https://spencerbrownstonegallery.com/exhibitions/feeel

Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce Youjin Yi’s FEEEL, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the United States. The exhibition is composed of new paintings, works on paper, and ceramics. “Where does it come from?” is the question posed by artist and then professor to Youjin Yi, Günther Förg at the start of her studies in Munich. She had just arrived from South Korea, leaving behind a more traditional, and to her, restrictive art education. The German word he used was Hintergrund or background . Yi understood the dual meaning of the word, not only as the spatial ground of a picture but the foundation or source of her being - her subconscious, her biography, the roots of her practice. That double meaning became the anchor to her work. For Yi, the canvas is a stage and the true backdrop is an inner world. Yi does not paint nature from observation. She paints from what she calls a “library of my heart,” a lifetime of accumulated memories and sensations. The creatures, plants, and landscape that feature in her work spawn from that world but are not necessarily statements about it. To access this well of material, she had to give up the plan. Sketches are not done in advance. Canvas or paper lie on the floor, and she works across it with her whole body, the brush wielded like a knife, carving or digging out the forms. The lines that emerge carry the body’s memory, so each painting is less an image than a trace. She is not painting a thought but thinking and feeling through the act of painting. Her process is a form of active imagination: a dialogue with images rising from within. She listens and waits for synchronicity, the moment an inner image meets an accidental mark and a complete form appears. That resonance is when the work feels most alive to her. The blur that results is deliberate. Having left Korea to see herself through another culture, Yi paints figures that refuse to settle. Their lines are openings rather than boundaries, dissolving the line between inside and outside. They stand for an identity that is complex, fluid, and often undefined. The archetypes she draws from, whether animal, figure, or element of nature, rise from what she believes is a collective unconscious, a shared ocean beneath each person’s private experience, or qualia: the subjective feel of a sensation that words cannot fully capture. This is why Yi offers no message. Her process is a model for the viewer’s own. Rather than asking “What is this?”, she invites you to listen for what the painting awakens in you, to enter your own active imagination, and perhaps to find a fleeting, luminous moment of synchronicity. If her making is an endless questioning of the inner self, that resonance is the answer she hopes will come back.

Upcoming dates:

- Tue, Nov 10 at 06:00 PM — Opening reception — Spencer Brownstone Gallery