Nayon Ashley Yoo was born and raised in Canada, and later moved to Korea to reconnect with her heritage and build a life of her own. That move meant starting over: learning to support herself independently in a country she was only beginning to know, while chasing a career in art she had never formally studied.

By day, she works in mergers and acquisitions, analyzing companies and numbers in service of larger corporate interests: the job that funds this new life and keeps her here, but also locks her into a version of herself she doesn't recognize. Painting is where she can be anything, create anything, and express emotions that words cannot reach.

In M&A, she often feels as though her soul is torn from her body, dragged into a kind of mental prison while her physical self carries on elsewhere. Painting is the one place where both exist together, where she feels most like her true self.

Her work moves between these worlds: the analytical, corporate life she inhabits out of necessity, and the emotional, boundless life she inhabits by choice, in a country and culture she is still learning to call her own. This tension, and the search for wholeness within it, is what she paints about.