Fans of minimalist art may be familiar with the work of the late Korean artist Yun Hyong-keun (1928-2007), who was remembered this year with a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul (MMCA) and at Venice's Palazzo Fortuny.
The artist was born in 1928 in Cheongju, South Korea, and as a child he lived under the Japanese occupation that finished in 1945.
He entered Seoul National University (SNU) in 1947, but he was arrested and expelled that same year for joining the campus-wide student protests against the U.S. Military Government's role in the school management.
After the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-53) he was branded a left-wing student, detained and set to be executed by a firing squad. He managed to escape at the last moment, but he was then trapped in occupied Seoul and forced to work for the North Korean Army. In 1956, charged of collaborating with communists, he was incarcerated for six months in Seodaemun Prison.
In the early '70s, while teaching art at Sookmyung Girls' High School, Yun criticised the admission of an unqualified student who had connections with the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA).
As a consequence, he was arrested again and released after promising to resign from his teaching post. Soon afterwards he committed himself to making art, becoming a full-time artist and abandoning bright colours to focus on more somber shades.
In 1986 he explained the reason behind this choice, writing in his diary: "I spent my youth – my twenties – living in a nightmare, even though your twenties are supposed to be great, no matter who you are. Maybe that's why the warm and delicate colors quickly disappeared from my works, replaced by dark and heavy colors."
The first paintings he created are part of a series that he called the "gate of heaven and earth": they were made with a paint that looks black, but it was actually a mixture of blue (to symbolise heaven) and umber (earth) that he would dilute with oil.
He established a very distinctive style, employing a wide brush to apply thick bars of paint to canvases of plain and raw cotton or linen (the artist first experimented with hanji, paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree, and then moved to cotton and linen).
The forms he created resembled gates with a pathway in between: looking into them was a bit like staring through a gate of pillars, beyond which there was another dimension.
The paintings look minimalist, but they were time-consuming as the artist would wait for the first layer of pigment to dry before applying others.
Among the works created in this first period there is "Burnt Umber" (1980) that Yun made after learning about the Gwangju Massacre (May 1980) that followed a pro-democracy protest. The painting shows a series of pillars that seem to stumble one on the other, like domino pieces. The pillars actually hint at people falling in the street while the dripping paint evokes blood.
Symblical and refined, his paintings used an edited version of the language of art to describe violence and atrocities. As he wrote in his diary in 1988, "True sorrow is connected to true beauty."
In the late 1980s, the artist simplified things even more, painting with pure black and using less oil in the paint mixture to create a drier surface. Though the shapes are minimal, there is still a great depth in these artworks and the works address solitude, death and the relations between living beings. Yun Hyong-keun deeply believed in the power of art to arouse feelings and emotions, but didn't believe in art as power. As he wrote in his diary in 1980, "Art isn't made with power, like a boxer, or with resourcefulness, like a politician. Art is only made with a person's heart."
Yun's works are usually associated with the paintings of Kim Whanki, an influential modern Korean artist, professor and Yun's mentor, friend, and father-in-law. The two artists are considered as part of the Dansaekhwa, a style of abstract painting that emerged in the 1970s in Korea and that featured artists (Chung Sang-Hwa, Ha Chong-Hyun, Chung Chang-Sup and Park Seo-Bo) who explored the physical properties of painting, focusing on materiality, tactility and technique.
There are many lessons to learn in Yun Hyong-keun's paintings, in his use of materials and symbolisms, but also in his diaries. The latter are compendiums of wise thoughts about art and life, and feature quotes that many creative minds will find inspiring, such as "Art doesn't come from someone who takes the shortcut. Only by taking the longest and most strenuous path can art send forth its fragrance. Truth is only realized and expressed through suffering."
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