At DIA Contemporary in Seoul, artist Yeon Yeoin presents her latest solo exhibition, The House That My Mother Built. The show is intimate yet expansive, examining how the spaces we inhabit as children shape the architectures we carry within us as adults.
Yeon, who studied both psychology and creative visual arts at Sogang University, has long been drawn to emotion as a subject. Her practice combines surreal imagery with a broad range of techniques, from pen and ink to digital painting. The result is a vocabulary of characters and dreamlike scenes that speak to feelings that often resist clear definition.
In this exhibition, the house becomes more than a dwelling. It functions as a metaphor for psychic shelter. Rooms transform into containers for formative experiences, layered with memory and imagination. Yeon recalls her childhood bedroom as a space of refuge, a site where private tea parties and storybook characters intertwined with her early sense of self. Today, that memory resurfaces in her painting process, which she describes as a deliberate act of translation. Each image becomes a way of turning fragments of lived emotion into a language for others to see, and possibly to recognize within themselves.
The works invite viewers to consider their own houses of memory. What rooms gave them safety, or perhaps confinement? What emotions remain stored there, unexamined? And how do those early architectures influence the way we build our present lives?
Yeon’s own words frame the show as both personal and universal: “The spaces I lived in, the words I heard, the picture books I saw, and the people I could not help but resemble, all of these built my house. Emotions deserve protection, and a room is everyone’s rightful claim.”
The House That My Mother Built runs at DIA Contemporary until September 27. It is a reminder that art can make visible the invisible structures we live inside every day, and that memory itself is a kind of architecture, always under construction.
