Yun Hyong-keun’s blue-and-umber world unfolds in Seoul retrospective

An exhibition delving deep into the works of Korea's late monochrome master Yun Hyong-keun opens across three venues in Seoul this autumn. PKM and PKM+ are hanging 30 paintings by Yun, painted from the 1970s to the 2000s, in “Reimagine Yun Hyong-keun,” which opened on Wednesday. Alongside that show, the house where Yun lived and worked throughout his life will open to the public as the Yun Hyong-keun House in Seogyo-dong, western Seoul, on Tuesday.

Yun's presence — the agony and joy of his art — lives on in the main studio of the House.

Paint that fell while Yun was working remains on the floor untouched, black at a glance and blue and umber up close. He used those two colors, blue and umber, for over three decades, working meticulously with different ways of mixing them. Yun’s own tools are laid out for the viewer to see at the house, with major paintings by the artist hung among them. The restoration of the Yun Hyong-keun House included preserving the furniture and miscellaneous objects inside.

At PKM Gallery in Samcheong-dong, central Seoul, the paintings are hung in chronological order, reaching back to the early works when Yun’s most frequent motif, the cheonjimun, began. Cheonjimun means "the door between heaven and earth" and was expressed throughout Yun's works with color massed on either side of the canvas and the middle left bare, the gap between the two columns forming the gate.

Blue stood for the sky and umber for earth, and Yun layered them until neither was quite distinguishable in a number of his works. Looking at one particular large work, “Umber-Blue” (1976), it has two dark columns on the left and one on the right, with bare linen between them, stained yellow where the oil has crept sideways over 50 years and gone rust-colored along the bottom edge.

From the mid-1980s, the columns in Yun’s paintings thicken until dark tones cover most of the canvas and the two columns become indistinguishable. “Burnt Umber & Ultramarine” (1989) looks like solid black until the viewer is near enough to find five thin seams of ground where the masses stop short of one another. Yun was also letting paint run past the edge of the form and onto the sides of the canvas, so the painted surface continues beyond where you can see it.

PKM+, the annex building of PKM Gallery, showcases every work Yun created after the 1990s.

Four works on hanji (traditional Korean paper) bring the “Reimagine Yun Hyong-keun” show to its finale. The hanji paintings — larger in scale, grander in elegance — mark Yun's departure from the mulberry paper he had been familiar with in Paris in the 1980s. The artist considered the slow, organic spread of the paint on hanji as a form of art.

"Art is only a trace of life, and living truthfully matters more than painting," Yun reportedly said before his passing in 2007 at the age of 79, and the traces show at both the Yun Hyong-keun House and PKM.

The exhibition runs through Oct. 3 this year, while the House is open to the public until Oct. 17.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]