I

 

In the 1960s, the Korean art world was very different from what it is today. The gallery system had not yet been developed, and most Korean artists did not have the financial means to independently host a solo exhibition. Furthermore, it was considered to be a bold and risky step for an artist to strike out on his own, opening himself completely to the public. As a result, the vast majority of artists presented their works solely in the context of group exhibitions.

That is why, although Yun Hyong-keun participated in various group exhibitions in the early 1960s, we should consider his bona fide debut to be his first solo exhibition, held at the Press Center in Seoul in 1966. At the time, Yun’s solo exhibition did not receive much attention, perhaps because his style did not seem to match either the academic art preferred by the National Art Exhibition of Korea (Gukjeon) or the contemporary art trends that most artists of his generation were exploring. This is also why very few people remember Yun’s early works. Indeed, I must confess that my own memories of Yun’s 1966 exhibition are somewhat hazy. About the only thing I can recall is a sense that the works had been strongly influenced by Kim Whanki, likely because of Yun’s solemn matière and impressive acuity for color.

 

 

II

 

As has been widely noted, Yun maintained a remarkably consistent style and artistic direction for many years. His works are devoid of concrete forms and objects, giving them an abstract quality. But in the early 1970s, his paintings changed significantly in terms of color and technique. Thus, the 1970s may be seen as the turning point, when he developed the aesthetics that would characterize his works for the rest of his career.

While some artists change gradually, others change quickly and drastically, in the manner of an epiphany. Such is the case for Yun, who shocked viewers with his sudden shift in style in the early 1970s. Of course, the more immediately obvious such changes are, the more we are curious to know what caused them. Here’s how Yun himself explained his work’s abrupt transformation: “My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison. Before that, I had used colors, but then I came to detest colors and anything vibrant. That’s why my works became dark. I was using the paintings to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.”[i]

By his own recollection, Yun was jailed several times for violating the National Security Law, before being acquitted or released on probation. His imprisonment in 1973 was the result of an incident at the high school where he had been teaching, where he protested favoritism in the admission of a student whose parents had government connections. Although usually a quiet man, Yun was forever defiant in the face of injustice. Due to this incident, he quit his job at the high school, and he did not receive another teaching post for more than a decade, when he was appointed a professor at Kyungwon University in 1984. He later rose to become the president of Kyungwon University, from 1990 to 1992.

As Yun noted, the changes in his style were his way of “venting spite” after multiple occasions of wrongful imprisonment. He came to see the brilliant colors and decorative compositions of his previous works as pretense. Looking back, this realization was nothing less than the discovery of his true self. Hence, starting from the early 1970s, Yun’s work was driven by his own “disposition to persistently adhere to the same direction, almost tactlessly.”[ii] The fact that he maintained such consistency for more than thirty years, until his death in 2007, demonstrates his conviction that this direction was the whole of his existence.

From the early 1970s onward, the defining feature of Yun’s art was the automatic execution of the act of painting. His attempt to restore the act of painting with the spirit of the time can be seen in his drawings, which typically feature a repetition of line. Furthermore, we can interpret the vertical compositions of his works from the early 1970s as a representation of the structure of rising power. These works clearly express the internalization of power through repetition and the will to ascend. Through natural absorption, the colors are integrated with the fabric of the canvas, bringing wholeness to the works. In this way, the composition of the color fields is independently created. The thin paint, heavily diluted with turpentine and linseed oil, is generously applied with a wide brush and left to settle into the raw canvas, yielding a firm and compact sensation. Losing its former state as a separate material layer, the paint becomes immaterial as it soaks into the canvas like a stain. In this way, the moment of material eradicating material is dramatically revealed.

Within this same context, some Dansaekhwa (Korean monochrome) artists used repetitive acts of painting to liberate themselves and to get closer to nature. As Yun explicitly stated, his own repetitive acts were intended to rarefy his internal spite, a process meant to attain a certain level of sincerity. Like some Dansaekhwa artists, Yun ultimately pursued a state of “living in nature,” which can be associated with wuwei (無爲, meaning “inaction” or “not doing”), in which all attempts at self-expression are transcended by a state of pure, natural existence. Recognizing such intentions, Nakahara Yusuke commented that Yun’s works are “artful by being artless” and represent “naturally formed painting.”[iii]

I once wrote that “Yun paints without a conscious goal, but in the end, something like nothing is created.”[iv] Chiba Shigeo stated that Yun’s works “express the world as a whole . . . which is completely different from what we usually call painting or art.”[v] As if anticipating these comments, Yun wrote, “My works are non-paintings; what is not painting, but the same as myself; what is before words; what cannot be explained by words; something like the daily log of a diary.” Michael Nuridsany called Yun’s art “an apparition. A presence. Not drips. Not traces. A mark. A kind of irreducible being-there. Something almost shy and silent, both immobile and active.”[vi] Not surprisingly, Yun’s notes include many references to nature: “I want my paintings to be done in a natural way. I want to make works that viewers do not pay attention to.”

 

 

III

 

By 1973, Yun’s practice of “painting done in a natural way” had begun to fully manifest. As the Untitled series evolved into works with “blue” or “umber” in the title, his style became complete. For Yun, colors were not merely a tool for depicting something else; his colors exist in and of themselves, such that they are the very purpose and essence of the works.

His palette is limited to just two colors: umber and blue (navy or ultramarine). After thinning the paint with turpentine and linseed oil, he applied it to untreated canvas, allowing the paint to soak into the fibers. Through this process, the colors began to ripen, or ferment, undergoing a phenomenon of discoloration resulting in different hues. Meanwhile, the texture of the cotton fabric or the Korean traditional paper, hanji, yields a coarse sensibility.

Yun’s decision to work on raw canvas was likely influenced by the Color Field movement, and he also expressed a deep admiration for the works that Kim Whanki, his early mentor and father-in-law, produced while living in New York (from 1963 to 1974). After moving to New York, Kim changed his style and began producing massive allover dot paintings, which had a profound influence on the Korean art field at the time.

Although Yun may have drawn inspiration from the Color Field movement, his works cannot be understood as a mere transplantation of that particular style. The same must also be said of Kim Whanki. Rather than scouring the contemporaneous art field for possible influences, we would be better served to elucidate the inherent aesthetics of their works from their respective methods. In this regard, both Kim’s allover dot paintings and Yun’s thin paint on raw canvas should be situated within the long tradition of Eastern painting.

Yun’s works from that period generally feature two vertical pillars (later increased to three and then four) rising from the bottom register of the canvas. As such, the works enact a space established by the pillars and the empty space between them. The pillars recall the large rock faces that often appear in Eastern landscape paintings. Seen this way, the gap between the pillars becomes a waterfall, or an empty void that widens into the open space beyond. That was my thought when I characterized his work as “abstract landscapes,” which open onto the horizon of an extremely simple yet abundant world. Yun himself defined umber as the color of the earth and blue as the color of the sky, and thus felt that the space was the “gate between heaven and earth.”[vii] This composition also relates to yin and yang, the contrast between existence and nonexistence, and the dramatic cycle of birth and death.

The subtle, seeping spread of color from the solid bars of burnt umber or blue is what gives his works such a profound resonance. At the center, the color is almost black, but it becomes lighter as it spreads, creating infinite layers. The outer edge of the seepage has no color at all, simply manifesting the presence of the spread itself. This effect can be seen in many traditional ink-wash paintings that employ the wet-on-wet technique, but it gains a more structural component when applied on canvas. Although Yun’s works do not bear any direct traces of his physical actions as an artist, the presence of the actions are still felt, immersing the canvas with a deep resonance.

 

 

IV

 

In Yun’s art, the tightly controlled colors of umber and blue evince nature through their own existence. Hence, in his paintings, the landscape is not a depicted scene or element but rather the return to nature itself. Exemplifying the effort to use painting to transcend painting, his art aims for a new dimension that cannot be associated with any specific field and is thus totally liberated. As Michel Nuridsany asserted, Yun “is one and only, is his own origin himself, and he can compare only with himself.”[viii] Thus, even though Yun shared a kinship with the Dansaekhwa artists for a long period of time, he also maintained his distance from the movement. Without question, his individuality as an artist always superseded any collective identity.

Another reason that Yun remained distant from groups with a contemporary sensibility was his constant focus on the idyllic and on bucolic regionality. He claimed that his works were “rustic paintings, like an earthenware jar of kimchi.” Channeling that same feeling, Joseph Love commented that Yun’s art was “something simple . . . [,] emitting the smell of soil like an earthenware jar of kimchi in a rural area of Korea.”[ix] This rustic regionality may be the reason why international viewers tend to be more impressed with his works than some Koreans have been. For some, the sense of decay that emanates from Yun’s mixture of umber and blue is not soothing but tanged with the aroma of fermentation taking place in earthen jars.

 

V

 

By the 1990s, Yun’s works and his artistic maturity were gaining international recognition and acclaim, such that he eventually became more active and involved in the global art scene than in Korea. Even prior to that time, Yun was often included among the representative contemporary artists of Korea who were introduced overseas. He was widely praised for his works at the 1992 group exhibition Working with Nature at Tate Liverpool, and a meeting with Donald Judd led to a solo exhibition at Judd’s gallery in New York in 1993. In 1995, Yun was one of four artists featured in the Korean Pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale. All of this demonstrates that Yun had clearly transcended the Korean art field to become an international artist.

Looking at the works that Yun produced from the 1990s to 2007, we cannot fail to detect differences from his earlier “abstract landscapes.” In many of these later works, the canvas is entirely filled with large rectangular shapes. Their dense saturation has a stifling effect that prevents viewers from thinking of a landscape. Instead, the composition is reminiscent of an iron door that blocks our way. Although the rustic simplicity—like the earthenware jar of kimchi—did not completely disappear, it was joined by the emergence of a strict self-regulation. The coexistence of filling and emptying reduces any thoughts or forms to silence, or wuwei (無爲, “inaction”). Rather than an extrapolation of vision, limited to a flat surface, his art had reduced itself to a whole, utterly devoted to itself alone. This is the very world that Yun Hyong-keun strived to enact: a domain apart from painting, expression, or form that transcends perception.

​

[i] Ryu Byounghak, “Paintings That You Never Get Tired of Looking At,” Monthly Art, May 2015.

[ii] Ajima Toro (東後郞), “Archaeology of Linear Thinking,” Yun Hyong-keun Recent Work – Umber (Osaka: Yamaguchi Gallery, 2001).

[iii] Nakahara Yusuke, “The Paintings of Yun Hyong-keun,” Yun Hyong-keun (Suzukawa, Humanité, Yamaguchi Gallery, 1989).

[iv] Oh Gwangsu, “Presence as Nature,” Yun Hyong-keun (Seoul: Gallery Silla, 1999).

[v] Chiba Shigeo, “Yun Hyong-keun’s Footsteps and His Universe,” Yun Hyong-keun (Seoul: Art Sonje Center, 2001).

[vi] Michel Nuridsany, “A Painting Stands Up,” Yun Hyong-keun (Paris: Jean Brolly Gallery, 2002).

[vii] Diary entry from January 1977.

[viii] Nuridsany, ibid.

[ix] Joseph Love, “Works of Yun Hyong-keun,” Yun Hyong-keun (Seoul: Munheon Gallery, 1976).