Grant Yun (American-Korean, b. 1996) is a digital artist who creates vector illustrations of everyday American scenes, in a style he calls “vectorized realism”and that others have described as Neo-Precisionism.,Working mainly in Adobe Illustrator, he builds his compositions from thousands of personal photographs taken across the United States.He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after growing up in San Jose, California.,
Yun taught himself to illustrate, starting with the shapes tool in Microsoft PowerPoint before moving to the vector tools in Adobe Illustrator. He has no formal training in art history and instead studied works in museums and galleries. His early series California and Midwest depend on the same simple geometries and smoothly polished surfaces as the original Precisionists, echoing the visual codes of Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha. He made the Midwest series in part so that hospital patients in Wisconsin could recognize their surroundings, and he donated framed prints of his work to hospitals.Yun also completed medical training alongside his art practice, earning a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2018 and a Doctor of Medicine from the Medical College of Wisconsin in 2024.
In 2023 Yun was one of fifteen artists selected to help launch MoMA's MoMA Postcard, a collaborative project built with the Autonomy wallet in which each artist designed a pixel-grid stamp that combined into a shared, co-owned postcard.,As the Chromie Squiggle project by Snowfro gained cultural reach beyond Art Blocks, Yun began incorporating its squiggle motif into his landscape paintings.
In 2024 Yun held his first solo show, “Growing Up”, at Soft Corner Gallery in Seoul, South Korea, examining his Korean-American identity through paintings dealing with distance and memory, including the contrast between an immigrant parent's habits and an American childhood.The following year he presented “SPACES” at Fellowship in London, a series of vector illustrations developed partly through what he calls “AI sketching” with text-to-image and image-to-text tools, that examines how automation and remote work have changed the value of commercial office space.,That year he also created new work on an original 1980s Quantel Paintbox for the “Paintboxed” exhibition at Digital Art Mile in Basel, alongside artists including Bryan Brinkman and Ivona Tau.,
