Roots in Korean Nature, Life

Yoon's brilliant painting praised as fresh postmodern vision of the world

Painter Yoon Kyung-hee's artwork always deals with subjects or themes she picks from her daily life. So, although her paintings should not be out of the ordinary, they have been nothing but that.
At least to Dr. Ellen Bishop of the University of Pittsburgh who sees her work as a fresh postmodern vision of the world. "I was dazzled,"the professor said in her critique of Yoon's painting.
Bishop went as far as to say that to her Western and American eyes Yoon's work was the first truly postmodern women's visual art she has seen. "At is at once the completely original work of a Korean woman steeped in the traditions of her culture, and a joyful and mischievous misappropriation of Western modernist styles, all of which adds up to a fresh postmodern vision of the world,"Bishop said.
"At every turn,"she said, "and from every angle her paintings are inclusive gestures that realign old oppositions -- east and west, feeling and thinking, abstraction and representation,
local ethnicity and global awareness -- into stunning paradoxical wholes."Bishop thinks Yoon is closest in style and sensibility to Georgia O'Keefe in the western canon, although her work is a postmodern reiteration of O'Keefe's modernist vision.
She said Yoon's paintings contain both the brilliant images of flowers as well as the geometric abstractions that praise and embody the light that informs the manifest world.
The professor continues to note that each of Yoon's canvases is a multi-planed prism or crystal across which slices of color and light play, sometimes in abstract patterns, sometimes in wild swirls -- a little like the fractal spirals of chaos theory.
In one of her early paintings, a large oil on canvas from 1983, large trapezoidal blocks of white and yellow light arise from the earth as rays of light and dark blue descend from heaven, meeting in the middle of the frame with a burst of brilliant yellow that swirls into beautiful blues and greens, oranges, yellows and reds.
   "The painting has a strong vertical quality to it like O'Keefe's much more sparse works,"Bishop wrote in her critique. Yoon was born into what many would argue was Korea's darkest period in history. After 35 years of ruthless and cruel Japanese domination, the division of her homeland, and the Korean conflict, however, she has witnessed the rebirth of her country and the emergence of global sensibility.
Like the poppies and roses that rise in the midst of her paintings from 1992, 1994 and 1996, the bunches of flowers that sometimes burst, sometimes flow across her more recent works ("Passion"1998, "Passion"1999), these same flowers bloom in her latest series "The Things I Love."Yoon is rooted in Korean soil and tradition, but grows up and outward towards the world stage where all of Korea is finding its place. From her perspective, Yoon picks up where O'Keefe left off, continuing and elaborating on a deeply feminine view of the world that subsumes the old oppositions of politics and sociability, east and west, abstract and representational into a whole new dynamic.
Bishop said she loves the way Yoon seems to take the western modernist male styles of the early 20th century, their tortured, often cubist abstractions that grotesquely fragment and destroy their objects, and using the same geometric insights, produces postmodern reaffirmations of the complicated and mysterious, coherent, but not totalized nature of human existence. Light suffuses her canvases, sometimes creating and sometimes cutting across places of color and image. It's as if Yoon caught a glimpse of the 'qi'energy that informs all life and all objects, Bishop concluded. nw

Travel: 45 x 53 cm:canvas: 2003

Travel: 130 x 81 cm; Oil on canvas; 2002

Painter
Yoon Kyung-hee

Passion: 73 x 60 cm: Oil on Canvas : 1999

Things I Love: 81 x 81 cm: Oil on Canvas: 2003

Travel: 81 x 30 cm;Oil on Canvas: 2003