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As a Korean kid growing up the ’60s in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the son of immigrant parents, always liked to draw. Back then he took a realistic approach to the American Goldfinch he sketched for a school report, careful to replicate its bright-yellow plumage, black cap, and white-edged wings. But as he developed as an artist, he adopted a stripped-down and simplified style. “It’s sort of my way of misremembering the world,” he says. “I deconstruct things and build them back in a way that makes sense to me.”

As the starting point for his interpretation of Լ����Ƶ’s drawing of Wild Turkeys,��Yang broke the birds down into geometric shapes and focused on the mother’s relationship with her chicks—“that’s what the art is really about,” he says. Then he gave it a cool retro look with the color blocks and minimalist morphology. Birds might not be his everyday subjects, but he likes them because they’re a metaphor for a lot of things—dreams, loss, love, coming home—and he thinks people have an emotional connection to them. No doubt Լ����Ƶ thought so, too.

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