Jongsuk Yoon, a distant physical and mental east

Paris,

Born in South Korea in 1965, Jongsuk Yoon moved to Germany in the early nineties to study art at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf, together with the conceptual author Fritz Schwegler. After its formation and installed in that city, it focused on the elaboration of drawings and paintings that could not be strictly tagged either as figurative or as abstracts: it was on paper, on canvas or directly on the wall has since then displayed landscapes close to the dreamlike characterized by their living chromatism and by the absence of recognizable motifs, beyond the territory itself in its amplitude. Both the painting of American fields and the traditions of the east Asian were among their referents.

After its recent passage through the Viennese Mumak, the Hannover Kestner Gesellschaft, the Nordiska Akvarellmuseet of Skärhamn (Sweden) or the Art Sonje Center de Seoul, Marian Goodman, who has already exposed his work at his Los Angeles headquarters, gives him in his Parisian subsidiary his first individual in France: it consists of a dozer Canvas and four gouaches on paper that, once again, respond to their desire to represent more mental landscapes than nestled in concrete geographies, which keep a deep connection with the Far East and with the country he abandoned thirty years ago and have been communed with the language of contemporary Western painting.

Yoon grew up to his thirteen years in a population close to rivers and mountain ranges, near Onyang, and that environment left in it a lasting mark, not so much in the form of faithful memories as of poetic and vibrant appreciations of nature; Korea and Asia, in their memory, are spaces at a physical and very personal time, in the same way as intertwining with their own experiences and moods the key period – which in those places could especially appreciate – of flowering: the exhibition of Azaleas or Forsythias wild that covered the mountain with its bright colors and that she has taken to her supports as large areas of flat or yellow tonalities. The clouds, the sun or rivers capture them, on the other hand, in softer ranges and pastel tones that emphasize the warmth, the enveloping and cozy character of a nature that, in their compositions, rather than as a framework, manifests itself as a home, a fertile home that is renewed and envelops us.

These scenes, which approximately since 2012 usually display in oil, nourish their memory as much as photographs, but cannot be approached without attending to the subjectivity and emotions that the artist projects in them, in great formats so as not to impose limitations and to generate by exhibiting them that surround sensation from which he conceives every landscape, generating in the rooms almost cinematographic effects. At Marian Goodman’s headquarters in Marais, canvases of several meters of extension have arrived, such as High Sun and Flowersand some murals carried out by order of different museums.

When working on them, the Korean of preliminary sketches or preconceived ideas does not start: it explains that it is the painting itself that guides it in processes that are at a physical and meditative time, spontaneous as dictated by the moment. Apply, overlap and juxtapone brushstrokes merging those interior and exterior visions so that a new identity landscape emerges from their hybridization. New but rooted in painting Shanshui (of mountain and water) that developed in China under the Tang dynasty, between the eighth centuries and x; The fact itself, in reality, not to stick to representing natural scenarios as they exist or have existed, but as a translation of individual sensations derived from an intimate relationship with the natural, it distanced it to a large extent of the usual western methods in the history of painting, while providing its vital breath to its elusive places. In his words, each canvas keeps his own life and his task is to make it visible.

This exhibition coincides with Yoon’s participation in the “Color of Water” collective, which can be visited until September at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Cheongju and welcomes two of its last murals.