Lumin Wakoa's artistic practice is grounded in the tradition of plein air painting and her pieces alternate between abstraction and representation. Her works are inspired by the trees and plants around her home in Queens, NY, and are created through a combination of observation and imagination. The semi-specific shapes in her compositions dissolve into indistinct imagery upon closer inspection. By employing a diverse range of mark-making tools, she creates rich and textural surfaces, where color bursts and impasto brushstrokes blur the boundaries of the image. The varying color palettes reflect the changing seasons and time of day, and surfaces convey the weather's impermanence through a mixture of heavily built-up areas of paint, thinner washes, wiped-away sections, and accumulations of delicate feather-like strokes. Amongst her more abstract and hallucinatory depictions of nature, she includes figurative elements such as skeletal figures, performing a primitive human role. Their bodies share affinities with plants, as they twist and curl in similar ways, suggesting both change and stasis.

Harper's

New York City

Los Angeles

Baik + Khneysser

Seoul

Gallery Hyundai

Chicago

Kavi Gupta

Long Beach

Long Beach Museum of Art

Miami

Ica Miami

Lacma

Lumin Wakoa

Seoul National University

Wild pear, Maine

Lily

Bittersweet

With Flowers

Knockouts in Full Bloom

Midmorning in the Garden