One of the most important Korean artists of the XNUMXth century is Yun Hyong Keun, not only for being a banner of the movement dansaekhwa, but to achieve through his method, the memory of traditional Korean techniques through a game with the void.
Born in Miwon-ri, Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea in 1928, he received his BFA of the Hongik University School of Fine Arts, Seoul, in 1957. During the 1960s, he was associated with the influential monochrome painting movement, Dansaekhwa, where he became an artist who experimented with the physical properties of painting and prioritized technique and process.
In large part motivated by the shortage of materials after the Korean war, Carried out from 1950 to 1953, the relative isolation of the country from the international art world led artists to construct their own sets of rules and structures in relation to abstraction, with which Yun stood out thanks to his restricted palette of overseas and umber. .
As the years progressed, Yun Hyong Keun He created his distinctive compositions by adding layer after layer of paint on canvas or raw linen, often applying the next layer before the last one had dried. He then diluted the pigments with turpentine solvent, allowing them to seep into the fibers of the support, staining it in a similar way to traditional ink on absorbent paper.
Working directly on the floor of his studio and through this form, the Korean artist produced simple arrangements of vertical bands. intensely dark surrounded by intact areas, resulting in hypnotizing, dark and engmatic works that revolve around a game between presence and absence, achieving success not only in his country, but also in NY, where in 1974, he was introduced to the work of postwar American artists, including Mark Rothko, which led him to further explore ways of dividing the pictorial space.
This inherent physicality of his works impressed several international artists, including Donald Judd, who invited Yun to exhibit in his spaces of Spring street en NY y Goods, Texas during the 1990s, which would be the artist's first solo performance in the U.S.
Yun Hyong Keun y Donald Judd. Source: Axel Vervoordt Gallery | Judd Foundation in New York
Since then, everything Yun would do would be symbolically connected to the natural world, so he worked on unprimed, unbleached linen and mulberry paper, creating absorbent surfaces of varied brown color whose fibers are visible in the first and vulnerable in the second, which also gave it the distinction of naturalistic artist.
In January 1977, well into international success but also into the brutally repressive reign of the president Park, Yun wrote in his diary: "The premise of my painting is the gate of heaven and earth. Blue is the color of heaven. Brown is the color of earth. The portal gives structure to the composition."
Having survived the Japanese occupation, the War of Korea, martial law, an arrest, torture, and an escape from the firing squad, Yun developed a way of painting in which affirmation and self-cancellation have become inextricable. For him, working with small means and painting black catwalks, he found a way to live and move on, giving life to one self-canceling brushstroke after another.
Sometimes the density of its pitch black becomes impenetrable and charcoal-like. The poverty of his paintings is dignified and never asks for the sympathy of the viewer. The shapes start at the bottom edge of the painting and work their way up the surface, reaching the top in some cases, but certainly not all. Thus their portals become mute, nameless and unrepeatable silhouettes.
In the end, his canvases are for those who would reflect on that commitment rather than looking at a work only to record what is seen and then move on. As a fun fact, one of the most fascinating things about Yun's exhibits is that no one takes a selfie while standing in front of one of his paintings, which could well be a great achievement around this time.
Despite his passing in 2007, his Korean sensitivity for reflection and meditation lives on through exhibitions at venues such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Munheon Gallery, Artsonje Museum, Inkong Gallery and Jean Brolly Gallery, among several others.
"What is painting? I still really don't know the answer. Is it a mere trace from combustion of life? I think one's ego is more freely and definitely expressed in the world of unconscious. The more one tries to express oneself, the ego becomes self-conscious, hence, the expression becomes contrived. Therefore, I don't think there can be answer to painting. I have no idea as to what I should paint, and at which point I should stop painting. There, in the midst of such uncertainty, I just paint. I don't have a goal in mind. I want to paint that something which is nothing, that will inspire me endlessly to go on. "
-- Yun Hyong Keun 1976
