Studio Visit - Yuna Ko

Yuna Ko draws with a 2B pencil on heavyweight cartridge paper. She has used the same pencil grade for twelve years. “It does everything I need,” she says. “I am not looking for more options.”

The studio

The studio is a converted storage room on the top floor of a building in Mapo-gu, Seoul. It is approximately four metres by five. One wall is windows. The other three are covered in shelves, most of them holding flat boxes in which finished and in-progress drawings are stored according to a system Ko describes as intuitive.

“I know where everything is,” she says. “Usually.”

The desk is wooden, large, and clear. There is a jar of pencils - all 2B, all the same brand, all in various states of use. There is a lamp. There is a small radio that receives one station clearly and several others with interference. It is on when I arrive.

The editions

Ko’s editions sell out within hours of announcement. Each print run is small - forty copies, signed and numbered. She does not work with galleries or publishers in the conventional sense. She has no agent. She does not have a website.

She announces new work through a mailing list she built herself over ten years and an Instagram account she updates roughly once a month, usually with a single image and no caption.

“I tried captions for a while,” she says. “They felt like explaining a joke. If the drawing needs words, the drawing is not working.”

On slowness

Speed is the enemy of drawing. This is not a philosophy Ko arrived at through reflection. It is something she discovered through failure.

“When I was younger I worked quickly. I thought that was confidence - finishing things, moving on. The drawings were technically fine. They were not interesting. I did not understand why.”

The shift came during a residency in rural Japan, where she was isolated enough to slow down without external pressure. “I had nowhere to be. I started spending a whole day on a single drawing. Then two days. I realised I had never actually looked at anything long enough to draw it properly.”

The drawings that resulted from that residency were, she says, the first work she recognised as genuinely hers.

On screens

Ko does not draw digitally. She is not opposed to digital tools in principle. She simply finds that the undo function changes her relationship to marks.

“With pencil, every mark is a decision. You might erase it, but you made it. With digital tools there is always the possibility that you didn’t really decide - you tried something and if it didn’t work you would undo it. That possibility changes the quality of attention.”

She pauses. “I know some people work around this. They discipline themselves. I don’t trust myself to do that, so I don’t use the tools.”

The question she keeps returning to

Toward the end of our conversation, Ko picks up a pencil and turns it between her fingers.

“If I can finish it in an afternoon, it probably was not worth starting,” she says. This is something she has said before - it appears in an interview she gave five years ago, in almost the same words.

I ask if she believes it or performs it. She considers the question seriously.

“I believe it now,” she says. “I had to learn to believe it. That took longer than the drawings.”