Yooyoung Amy Oh is a Korean-Canadian mixed media artist who majored in Fibre Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She was born in Seoul, grew up in Montreal, and is currently living in Toronto. When asked as a child what she wanted to do when she grew up, she always replied “an artist.” She was always busy with drawing and creative things. Drawing and painting as a child helped her discover her love of the arts, which she continued to explore in her studies in Fine Arts. After her studies, she worked in the fashion industry for a decade and is now a full-time artist. Oh’s work has been exhibited throughout Canada, the United States, and South Korea. Through her diverse cultural influences, she is finding her own unique colour in her acrylic paintings. She creates works that are narrative and abstract, pulling inspiration from nature and objects surrounding her.

The main focus in my artworks are the laws of nature, because they are a self-examination of myself. Through my paintings, I express the nature of life, the tranquillity of mind that I always get from nature, and how I grow and cherish everyday life in such a fast-paced world. In my paintings, I represent the different interpretations of nature and the complex feelings that human beings feel in certain circumstances in life. Plants, trees, flowers, and landscapes are fundamental elements in my paintings. I find the key to living in balance with myself and others within society by observing nature’s order and harmony. In addition, I often use the everyday objects surrounding me as themes for my works because they symbolize feelings or experiences that I have. I try to look deeply at the true beauty of the miscellaneous things in daily life. I have always had a deep interest in tactile textures in my paintings. I frequently use different materials such as acrylic paint, mulberry paper, thick gesso, and oil sticks to create abundant textures on the canvas. The beauty of tactile texture is that it captures light from various angles at different times of the day, accentuating the richness of the texture on the surface of the painting. This creates the  impression that the object is genuinely moving and pulsing with energy.