Rimi Yang is an ethnic Korean who was born and raised in Osaka, Japan. In 1986 she moved to Ohio, where she studied at Bowling Green University. She then moved to Los Angeles in 1991. There she studied at California State University, the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art and the Otis College of Art and Design. She also spent a summer in Florence, Italy, studying at the Florence Academy of Art. She has lived and worked near the ocean in Santa Monica since 1991.
Yang is known for her intense enthusiasm for vibrant color which is manifested in both her figurative and abstract paintings. She came to art after spending many years working in library science, but made up for that tardiness with her passion for solitary studio practice. Celebrating the chaotic emotional duality that exists in life in her art, she revels in the confusion mankind creates in its attempt to order the un-orderable and to explain the unexplainable. Adhering to Joseph Campbell's dictum that the best things in life are those you cannot explain, her paintings are intuitive and instinctive, balancing acts of contrasts.
She both builds up and tears down surfaces and images, searching for reason where none exists, for that imaginary perfect world of equilibrium on each canvas. Creating a new language with each work, using each as a stepping stone to the next, she is dedicated to making each painting better than her last. That Yang's work is universal in spirit yet personally intimate is evident upon viewing her paintings.
