Hakgojae Gallery is pleased to present 《Shapeless Loop》, a solo exhibition by Yoori (b. 1994), from November 19 (Wed) to December 20 (Sat). This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring approximately 52 new works, including paintings and object installations, the exhibition encapsulates the structures of thought and textures of perception that the artist has recently explored. Over the years, Yoori has developed her artistic practice around the core theme of connectivity. She explores how meaning emerges and transforms across different layers—between language and visual language, painting and medium, image and paper, interior and exterior, self and other. Her approach focuses on composing relations rather than dissolving boundaries, translating abstract notions of connectivity into a visual language and expanding them into embodied thought. The reality we sense flows through spaces beyond words. In these undefined gaps, Yoori perceives ‘invisible sentences.’ She is drawn to the parts where meaning resists translation, making painting and artist books experimental grounds for reconstructing language. Within them, image and concept, material and thought merge, blurring the line between expression and meaning. Yoori explores these intervals to create new forms of language from absence. Painting functions as a language outside words. Yoori’s works are like sentences made from non-existent words—unreadable poems and novels. She describes herself as a connector—bridging language, painting, material, self, and other. Connecting is central in her practice, resonating beyond material relations. The exhibition Shapeless Loop unfolds along two conceptual axis. The first is the exploration of continuity between presence and absence. Yoori does not perceive life and death, beginning and end as opposites, but as a single circular flow that mirrors and reflects itself. From the resemblance between a candle on a birthday cake and one at a funeral, or between a mourning ribbon and a gift ribbon, she draws a profound insight: identical forms can carry entirely different layers of emotion. The subtle shift between these emotions marks the precise point where presence and absence converge. By capturing these moments of symbolic transition, the artist reveals life and death, beginning and end, not as divided states but as cyclical reflections of one another. This is both her way of perceiving the world and an ethical method of contemplating loss and mourning. Her paintings thus record absence while simultaneously serving as rituals of consolation, reconnecting what has disappeared. The second axis is the exploration of the structures of connection between different existences. The Shapeless Loop in her work does not denote a solid ring; it symbolizes a fluid, unbroken flow of relations. It expands into multi-layered structures linking inner and outer worlds, perception and thought, the individual and the collective. Through the traces of intersecting and circulating lives, the artist depicts the transparent networks that surround us—currents that are barely perceptible yet undeniably present—made visible through the dual media of painting and book. Her practice is not about revealing the invisible; it translates the imperceptible into sensory experience. The pictorial surface becomes a site where different beings encounter and merge one another, leaving traces as layers of color and texture. By revisiting the archetypal meaning of ‘connection’, Yoori suggests that all relations are born from absence. Her paintings grasp the rhythm of a world that cannot be fully reduced to language, revealing within its subtle tremors a new order of being—where existences sense and connect with one another. They are fields of relations, perpetually forming, dissolving, and reuniting. 《Shapeless Loop》 is thus an attempt to capture the texture of invisible relationships and a sensory exploration of a world before language. As a fluid and shapeless loop where disparate beings intersect and permeate one another, the exhibition lingers beside us as a quiet resonance.