Song E Yoon, Beom Jun, Rob Pruitt

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August 14 - September 10, 2025 | New York

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Opening : August 14, 2025 6-8 pm  RSVP

 

 

Space 776 is pleased to present Synthetic Sanctuaries, a group exhibition featuring Beom Jun, Song E Yoon, and Rob Pruitt, on view from August 14 to September 10, 2025, at its New York location. Bringing together three distinct yet resonant artistic voices, the exhibition explores the concept of sanctuary through material, emotional, and philosophical registers, offering visitors a space of reflection, rupture, and renewal.

 

 

In a time when emotional fatigue and fractured perception have become the default conditions of daily life, the desire for sanctuary intensifies—not as a return to an idealized nature or utopian escape, but as a space built from fragments, memory, and the echoes of discarded meaning. Synthetic Sanctuaries combines three distinct artistic practices—Beom Jun, Song E Yoon, and Rob Pruitt—to explore what it means to create refuge from within the imperfect, the residual, and the provisional. This is not a sanctuary born of wholeness, but one that arises through composition, rupture, and resonance.

 

Beom Jun’s paintings are rooted in existential inquiry, shaped by a prolonged physical pain confronting him with mortality. His multilayered compositions, often built from transparent washes depicting mountains, oceans, or cosmic elements, are less about landscape and more about the metaphysical structure of perception. In his Coexistence series, the repeated act of applying and erasing paint becomes a meditative process that allows invisible images to surface and emptiness to transform into presence. The sharp lines trailing his canvases recall ancient mythologies in which the world is born through the rupture of the void. Here, painting becomes a dimension of emergence—a state rather than a surface.

 

Song E Yoon expands the idea of sanctuary through temporal materiality. Drawing from Eastern philosophy, quantum physics, and the symbolic weight of capital, her installations incorporate IV bags, ink, and salt to create living systems of flow and decay. Her concept of the “Moist Hand”, derived from Roy Ascott’s Moist Media, reimagines the intersection between technology and emotion as a soft, permeable interface. In her works, time is not linear but accumulative, tactile, and saturating. Viewers do not merely witness her installations; they experience the slow rehydration of their perception. The sanctuary she offers is not a shield, but a space of atmospheric absorption—where emotion condenses and meaning diffuses.

 

Rob Pruitt offers a counterpoint by turning the notion of the sanctuary on its head. His contribution to the exhibition features a selection of works curated initially and presented through his Flea Market project. This ongoing social installation collapses the boundaries between art, commerce, authorship, and anonymity. Recontextualized within Synthetic Sanctuaries, these works—from emotional paintings and discarded objects to daily visual records—speak to the spiritual condition of late capitalism. His Suicide Paintings, Date Paintings, and Month of Sunsets series transform ephemeral feelings and fleeting time into visceral color fields, each imbued with personal resonance and collective familiarity. What was once spontaneous and informal becomes a deeply coded vulnerability archive here.

 

Pruitt’s inclusion raises a critical question: Can sanctuary be made from the detritus of everyday life? Can it exist in the tension between sincerity and irony, commodified sentiment and genuine affect? His works suggest yes—not by offering transcendence but by rooting sanctuary in the chaotic intimacy of the ordinary.

 

Together, these three artists construct an exhibition that is less about protection and more about permeability. The sanctuaries they present are not fixed sites, but temporal, affective, and material conditions. Their practices ask viewers to reconsider what it means to feel, remember, and remain intact in a world that often demands disassembly.

 

Synthetic Sanctuaries are not refuges from reality but reassemblies of it. They are spaces where the fractured becomes formative, slowness becomes resistance, and emotion—unfixed, ambiguous, circulating—becomes architecture. In this exhibition, we find that the possibility of sanctuary is not elsewhere; it is here, in the remnants of what we carry, what we shed, and what we choose to make sacred again. 

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Artist statement 

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Song E Yoon

I researched intangible dimensions through the media with the theory of the 20th-century press, modern science, and philosophy. Therefore, I designate my works as ‘ INTANGIBLE　ART’, a new multimedia art genre. ‘INTANGIBLE　ART’ is a new multimedia art genre by me, a contact between materials and immaterials that expresses spiritual or invisible things using various media. I was published by my theory ‘INTANGIBLE　ART’, which is meant and expressed through my works in a master’s thesis, in 2018.

 

‘INTANGIBLE　ART’ is divided into four categories depending on the expression mode: “Process Art, Medium characteristics of materials as light ·sound ·space, Moving and Cycling, Materialization of code and network” and written in symbols as M² I. Process Art displays the process of progress for the work of art in the exhibition hall. Next, the Medium characteristics of materials, such as light ·sound ·space, focus on the harmony and balance of materials of light ·sound · space and space. Third, moving and Cycling express the overshoot daily phenomenon as gravity and evaporation through natural energy. Finally, the Materialization of code and network shows the process of intangible energy through the online network.

 

 In my works, I learned that ‘INTANGIBLE　ART’ has a visible form as a process that includes invisible meaning.

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Beom Jun​

“Infinite Layers, Unfixed Mountains”

 

I am deeply interested in the concept of “infinite beings” and “unfixed states,” particularly as they relate to quantum mechanics, a field of modern physics. In the early stages of my painting practice, I was drawn to probability—states of existence that are not yet determined. I struggled with how to introduce these abstract concepts through my visual language.

 

During that time, I frequently traveled between Seoul and my hometown, Jeonju, often driving along long stretches of highway. As I neared Jeonju, I would catch sight of the layered mountain ranges beyond the open plains—ever-present, familiar, and quietly majestic mountains. This recurring image became the motif for my paintings.

 

I mix oil paint with transparent medium to depict these mountains in a single layer. I then wipe away the pigment repeatedly with a brush until the color becomes nearly translucent. This process of erasure is not an act of removal but one of revelation. I invite a new mountain to emerge through repetitive gestures—almost meditative and ritualistic. It is not a mountain that remains after wiping, but one summoned by wiping itself.

 

By layering this process, I construct compositions in which the background and multiple mountain forms coexist in a single view. These overlapping forms evoke the endless variation found in nature’s topography. Each mountain layer represents an individual life, while the accumulation of these layers reflects the layered nature of human history within the vast time of the universe. The mountains become metaphors for time’s accumulation—histories interwoven, pasts and futures connected through infinite cycles.

 

This is a practice of “repetition that holds change”—a visual meditation on the probabilistic states awaiting their manifestation.

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Rob Pruitt

​I work in a variety of mediums, but primarily, I construct large figure drawings of the community of people in my immediate environment. These people occupy not only my real world but also my imagination. Through my drawing process, these works quickly become fictional profiles rooted in ethnography and portraiture. I combine and juxtapose various signs and symbols from science and science fiction, rap music, comic books, black political struggles, and African traditional cultures in their dress styles. My hope has always been that these works would gradually, through visual representation, universalize marginal identities, specifically black identity. For my career, I have been wrestling with this idea of universality and how to extend this notion to more identities. Most recently, I have been concentrating on craftsmanship as a means to this end. I am attempting to perfect my techniques of drawing the human form. I suspect that the power in the well-crafted and rendered image can speak to an essential humanity.

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