STPI in Singapore has opened the largest presentation in Southeast Asia of work by the South Korean artist Yoo Hyun Mi. "The Blank Puzzle (The Image Yet to Come)" runs from 31 October to 12 December 2026 and brings together nearly three decades of work that treats the jigsaw puzzle as a way of thinking about consciousness, identity and the space between image and object. The exhibition follows three residencies Yoo undertook at STPI between 2023 and 2025, working with the institution's workshop team to test new materials and techniques.

The puzzle has anchored Yoo's practice since 1997, when she was assembling a jigsaw with her son and a piece landed blank-side up. For her, the pictured face of a piece stands for consciousness and its blank reverse for the subconscious, two sides of the same object that never quite line up. Across the show the pieces rarely behave as expected: some keep their familiar shapes while others turn irregular, fragmented or almost unrecognisable, so the image stays visible even as its structure breaks down.

Among the works on view are the "Flying Carpet" series, in which each piece contains 1,960 irregular forms laser-cut at STPI and then hand-painted by the artist, and a group of "Sky" photographs taken around twenty years ago, printed onto puzzles and rearranged according to the feelings their colours evoked. A specially built room gathers the "A Perfect Duet" series as a single installation, while compressed paper pulp is shaped into forms that look like stone and a plywood work, "Around the Corner", bends the familiar running-man exit sign into an unexpected portal.

The show takes its title from a Korean understanding of blankness as a space of possibility rather than an absence, a sensibility that echoes Dansaekhwa, the monochrome painting movement, and its attention to material, repetition and quiet making. Yoo's point is that perception is never neutral: what we see in an image depends as much on the frameworks we bring to it as on what is actually there.