Pictorial ideas around a symbol of blankness
Yoo Hyun Mi: The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come), 2026, installation view. Image courtesy of STPI, Singapore.
The first artwork one encounters in Yoo Hyun Mi: The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come) at STPI is a thick sheet of compressed paper pulp, coated in acrylic paint. In the middle is a laser-cut curvy form that is slightly twisted, as if it is trying to pop out from the rest of the sheet. Even though there is no image, the artwork title Venus No. 4 (2026) evokes possible allusions to femininity and sensuousness. More directly, the form can be interpreted as a puzzle piece that does not quite fit neatly into the overall plane.
The exhibition is the latest chapter in Seoul-based artist Yoo Hyun Mi’s The Blank Puzzle project (1998-present). Blankness, in Yoo’s words, is “never truly empty” and she connects it to the ideas of potential and the subconscious. This notion is succinctly captured in Venus No. 4, where the relationship between positive and negative space is unclear. The laser cut line provides some kind of structure, but not sufficient detail for a picture to form. The title offers a suggestion of meaning without fixing it, like a game played between the artist and audience.
“Blankness, in Yoo’s words, is ‘never truly empty’ and she connects it to the ideas of potential and the subconscious.”
Yoo Hyun Mi, Venus No. 4 (detail), 2026, acrylic paint on laser cut STPI handmade paper, 106 x 77.3 13cm. © Yoo Hyun Mi / STPI. Image courtesy of STPI, Singapore.
Yoo Hyun Mi: The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come), 2026, installation view. Image courtesy of STPI, Singapore.
Yoo Hyun Mi’s short story, The Blank Puzzle. Image courtesy of STPI.
What I find most interesting about The Blank Puzzle is that the works draw from Yoo’s 1998 short story of the same name. The story follows Blank, a white puzzle piece in search of their “bigger picture”. This provides two ways of approaching the exhibition: firstly, to engage with the works only through their form and materiality; and secondly, to allow the story to influence one’s interpretation. It is worth exploring both to see how one’s experience shifts.
Yoo Hyun Mi, Cloudy Day (sky series no.4), 2026, photograph on paper puzzle (C-print), 79.7 x 111cm (artwork), Unique. © Yoo Hyun Mi / STPI. Image courtesy of STPI, Singapore.
Yoo Hyun Mi: The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come), 2026, installation view. Image courtesy of STPI, Singapore.
On my first viewing of the exhibition, prior to reading The Blank Puzzle, Yoo’s painterly sensibility stood out to me in the Sky and Flying Carpet series. The former are paper puzzle pieces assembled from fragments of photos taken by the artist, at different times and locations. Though largely monochromatic, the works are composed with an attention to shifting tones and textures. Even the singular puzzle pieces carry subtle gradients and blurs. In contrast, the Flying Carpet series is highly saturated and energetic. The work is made up of 1960 uniquely shaped puzzle pieces, each hand painted by the artist.
Both series employ all-over compositions that scatter one’s attention across the plane. While each fragment carries a similar amount of visual weight, their uniqueness is emphasised by how Yoo arranges their position within the overall composition. In doing so, the artist also highlights the puzzle’s matrix as a structure through which the pieces can relate to each other without sacrificing their individuality. This formal strategy connects to the conceptual underpinnings of The Blank Puzzle project and Yoo’s longstanding exploration of perception and reality. It also speaks to the key message in her short story.
Yoo Hyun Mi, One or Two No. 1, 2026, Acrylic paint on STPI handmade paper, 110 x 85 x 0.5cm. © Yoo Hyun Mi / STPI. Image courtesy of STPI, Singapore.
Yoo Hyun Mi, The Puzzler No. 1, 2026, acrylic paint on laser cut STPI handmade paper, 76 x 46.5 x 17cm, Unique. © Yoo Hyun Mi / STPI. Image courtesy of STPI, Singapore.
With Yoo’s story as a paratext, the exhibition takes on a markedly more colourful and emotional tenor. Certain idiosyncratic formal decisions can be interpreted as nods to the characters, such as the bright red glow behind One or Two No. 1 (2026) and the brown edges of the Puzzler series. However, the artworks are not didactic representations nor does the story offer a direct explanation for them. Instead, one can think of the artworks as objects that also live within the playful and innocent world of her story.
“Instead, one can think of the artworks as objects that also live within the playful and innocent world of her story.”
Yoo Hyun Mi: The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come), 2026, installation view. Image courtesy of STPI, Singapore.
This feeling is most strongly felt in the central room of the exhibition, where the A Perfect Duet series is presented as an immersive installation. The artist pairs fragments to create new possibilities, across printed and three-dimensional works. What looks like wooden panels are painted compressed pulp sheets. Because of how the puzzles were personified in Yoo’s story, each shape now takes on an interior life and formal characteristics become even more pronounced and dynamic. The space afforded by abstraction expands, as I speculate more deeply about their interactions between each fragmented form.
The theme of relationality is interwoven into the worldview proposed by Yoo’s long-term project, from the symbolism of its central motif to the humanist message in the story, and the formal experiments in this new body of work at STPI. In her author’s note at the end of The Blank Puzzle, Yoo writes: “When you change the frame of your thinking, everything else changes along with it.” This statement holds true in different ways, in rethinking the blankness on the pictureless side of a puzzle piece and in how pictorial ideas are experienced across text and objects.
This article is presented in partnership with STPI.
Yoo Hyun Mi: The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come) is on view from 31 October to 12 December 2026, at STPI, Singapore. For more information, click here.