Grant Yun: From PowerPoint Shapes to SPACES

Grant Yun builds his pictures out of shapes. He works in Adobe Illustrator, stacking vector shapes and layers, "which is how old video games were created," as he told Right Click Save in 2023. The source material is his own: since 2014 he has photographed across the United States on his iPhone or a DSLR, then mashed those thousands of photos together, thinking of the work "as both collage and illustration at the same time." He calls the style Neo-Precisionism, and it moves "from the most minimal to the point where it's almost photorealistic," returning again and again to roads, diners, offices, train windows and the rolling hills and sunburned grass of California.

He grew up in San Jose, where his father was an engineer at Intel, and he started out with the shapes tool in PowerPoint. He never sat down for a tutorial and has no formal art education, which he counts as a kind of freedom: "If I'd had formal training, I probably would have been influenced to pursue a specific way of creating art." The art grew alongside other lives. He studied biochemistry and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison, earned his MD at the Medical College of Wisconsin, co-authored cancer research, won breaking battles across the Midwest, and made his Midwest series for hospital walls, "because I wanted people who lived in Wisconsin to connect with their surroundings while they were in hospital." On October 9 he listed the setbacks along the way, from a failed company and a clothing brand that failed to launch twice to gallery rejections and a first failed application to medical school: "just learn and keep going."

Onchain, he teamed up with Andrew Mitchell to found Mitchell and Yun Studios, whose genesis project Primera is a 400 piece p5.js series stored fully onchain and released CC0 as "a study and interpretation on the fundamentals of early 20th century art"; he has been reposting its outputs this month. He went on to be one of 15 artists chosen to launch the MoMA Postcard, held the solo show Growing Up at Soft Corner in Seoul in 2024, on his Korean heritage and Korean American identity, and showed SPACES at Fellowship in London in 2025. That series turned to offices and the built environment, made partly through what he calls "AI sketching," and asked: "How are we to value physical spaces in a world that continues to prioritize its virtual counterparts?"

The architecture is still where he is headed. Since October 5 he has been showing works in progress "on something," first a dense black and white line plan of city blocks, rail lines and a park, then on October 8 a drawing of towers, a parking structure and trees that he called "one of my most ambitious projects yet." The same week, his illustration of a Bitcoin mining facility appeared in History of Bitcoin by Smashtoshi, a project of 128 moments in Bitcoin's history by 128 artists.

Sources

• Right Click Save: The Interview, Grant Yun (Sep 2023)
• Hypebeast: A Conversation With Grant Yun (Jul 2022)
• Fellowship: Spaces by Grant Yun
• Grant Yun: SPACES
• Grant Yun: Growing Up
• Grant Yun: Medicine/Research
• Grant Yun: Dance
• Grant Yun: Generative (Mitchell and Yun Studios)
• Andrew Mitchell: Primera
• Grant Yun on X: just learn and keep going (Oct 9)
• Grant Yun on X: works in progress (Oct 5)
• Grant Yun on X: one of my most ambitious projects yet (Oct 8)
• History of Bitcoin by Smashtoshi on X (Oct 9)