There are things we experience and sense that cannot be fully rendered in ordinary language or visual images—the longing for someone, the loneliness of a foreign city, or what lies beyond what the eye can capture when looking at an object: the time spent with it, the feel of it. The Untranslated brings together the works of two painters, You Hyeonkyeong and Linhan Yu, who seek to make visible through painting what cannot be wholly translated into any language or visual form.

In The Way to Understand an Apple – Coldest Mode, the apple Linhan Yu depicts is not the apple we know. Captured through thermal imaging, it is perceived not by light but by heat—revealing not its appearance or color, but its internal structure, its external conditions, the traces of time inscribed upon it. The artist does not reproduce this captured image directly. Instead, he paints over it, redrawing its form with rough, deliberate brushstrokes. In this process, what the machine’s eye seized in its coldest mode is returned by the artist’s hand to something unstable and mutable. Through this, Yu asks how deeply our vision is shaped by the conditions through which it operates. If Cézanne unsettled the illusion of a single viewpoint by looking at one apple from multiple perspectives simultaneously, Yu poses the same question through technological mediation, in the language of today. The same logic extends to his practice of assembling multiple canvases into a single image without fixing their arrangement. The meaning of a subject does not reside in any completed form; it is generated within relationships and regenerated each time those relationships shift. In Rock, human hands are placed alongside an abstract geometric grip. The two images share no direct connection, yet our perception moves between them and fills the gap, conjuring a third image that exists in neither. What our vision cannot capture—temperature, time, the relations between things—he draws into the language of painting.

You Hyeonkyeong’s painting sets out from the opposite direction. Rather than looking outward, she waits for something within. The brushwork that appears fast and rough is in fact something that has long been gathering—bursting forth only after sustained stillness. For You, the figures and landscapes that appear on her canvases are not there to be depicted; they are vehicles for an interior state. One Two One Two Toddler, painted in Berlin shortly after her move there, belongs to a period when homesickness drew her back to childhood as a subject. The vast scale of the canvas and the sweeping gestures of its marks carry something else: a kind of defiance, a will toward bodily possibility, in the wake of an accident in Korea that had left her body impaired. In Should Work Hard, painted in a windowless studio in Lewisham, London, the gridded brushwork and racing rabbits produce a space where absence, frustration, and pressure are folded together. Where I Hang Around, depicting an unnamed cathedral encountered on a walk through Berlin, and Ganga, depicting the landscape of the Ganges, are not landscapes seen with open eyes but landscapes recalled with eyes closed. She speaks of what becomes visible in that waiting darkness as abyss—as abstraction. The dark forms that appear on these canvases are what she has drawn up from that quiet depth. In this way, she gives form to what could not be spoken, to what has accumulated without ever being translated into words.

Where Linhan Yu borrows the cold gaze of technology to point toward what vision cannot reach, You Hyeonkyeong begins from where language cannot go—through feeling and gesture. From outside in, from inside out: the directions differ, but both artists attend to what resists full translation, and neither treats the image as a finished result. This exhibition invites us to suspend, for a moment, the familiar frameworks of vision and language we take for granted. In that space of indeterminacy, we may find ourselves rethinking how images and meanings come to be formed at all.