We do not think right away of the distances that separate objects from one another. For space is never empty: it always embodies a meaning. – Henri Lefebvre, 1974

839 is pleased to announce Union Station, the first solo exhibition from Seoul-born, Los Angeles-based artist Yunghun Yoo. This exhibition surveys Yoo’s new and recent paintings, exploring the interstices of movement, infrastructure, and the body as it navigates urban space.

8 (2) (2025) is a painting that traces the paths of trains through an abstracted network of dots and lines. The composition evokes the precision of track maps and the kinetic energy of motion, while washes of muted tones suggest the sensory experience of waiting in a station: the flicker of screens, the rumble beneath one’s feet, the drift of thoughts while dozing off. The title comes from Track 8 at Union Station, the primary railroad hub in Los Angeles and the largest passenger rail station in the Western United States. Yoo often traveled this route from downtown to Claremont, CA as a student, and in this work he considers how the commute, though governed by timetables, remains a space of unpredictability, where chance, interruption, and passing moments echo the rhythms of everyday life. The number eight is additionally significant in East Asian numerologies, connoting luck and prosperity, which resonates with the artist’s interest in contingency and serendipity. 

The exhibition as a whole explores the tension between the station and the train, between stasis and motion, sociality and solitude. Yoo likens tunnels and tracks to arteries and blood vessels, framing transportation as a circulatory system for the city. The realm of the train functions as a ‘heterotopia,’ in Michel Foucault’s sense, both a shared space of passage and an “other” site of isolation and reflection. In the American imagination, the train has long symbolized freedom, expansion, and the romance of departure, from the mythology of the frontier and Manifest Destiny to the restless drift of the Beat sensibility. Within this space, Yoo attends to the flow of passengers, aware that each movement carries traces.

The symbolism of the train is especially resonant in Los Angeles, a region once equipped with a sophisticated rail network, and now seeking to recover a measure of that functionality. Across the West, railroads were built through the labor of Chinese workers who faced hazardous conditions and undercompensation. Exclusion acts sought to erase their presence after their work was done, a reminder of the inequities underpinning the expansion of infrastructure. These tracks in turn became arteries of migration, linking communities across regions and cultures. In his paintings, Yoo engages with these infrastructures as sites of reflection, memory, and formal lyricism, while acknowledging their sordid layers.

Yoo draws from a lineage of painters who expand the possibilities of figuration, including Philip Guston, Georg Baselitz, and Nicole Eisenman. These artists challenge conventional realism, using distortion, symbolism, and expressive mark-making to imbue everyday subjects with psychological, political, and narrative depth. In their hands, figuration becomes a way to reflect the contradictions of lived experience, at once familiar and strange, humorous and unsettling, grounded and abstract. Yoo's approach similarly engages these tensions, treating figuration as a flexible visual language.