Yoo Seungho's Solo Exhibition "FROM HEAD TO TOE" on view through November 25, 2017, at P21

Echo Word Painting

Natural, 2017

yodeleheeyoo~, 2007

Miss Lamella, 2019

fool, 2017

Woo soo soo soo, 2017

Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

In 1999, he held his first solo exhibition, 《hee hee hee》 (1999, Gallery Jo, Seoul, Korea) at the Jo Sung-hee Gallery. It was an exhibition that well expressed the purpose of the work that the artist had in the beginning. The artist wanted to continue to work with the thoughts and mindset he had at the beginning, and this was the exhibition that best suited it.

In 2005, 《echowords》 exhibition was held at One and J Gallery. In this exhibition, two series of ‘Text Landscape’ and ‘Text Play’ were presented. ‘echowords’ has a dictionary meaning of ‘words to imitate’ and is a representative term for his drawings made up of meaningless words such as onomatopoeia and mimic words.

The artist also participated in the residency program at Doosan Gallery New York, where he held 《echowords》 (2013, Doosan Gallery, New York, USA). The artist pays attention to the interrelationship between the words written in the work and the images seen there. The word ‘echowords’ means that words can imitate images, images can imitate words, and it can also be some interaction between the two.

In 2017, he held a solo exhibition titled From Head to Toe at P21. In this exhibition, the ‘Text Play’ series was mainly composed of calligraphic shapes using Chaucer among calligraphic typefaces. ‘Text Play’ is a playful work that looks like a childish pun that comedians or children play.

For example, indicates a cerebrovascular disorder caused by cerebral blood vessel bleeding, but in English, it is also pronounced as ‘natural’, meaning ‘natural’. is an onomatopoeic word for pressing her urine, but in English it means ‘she’.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

The artist participated in the group exhibition 《Kongsan Art Festival》 held at Dong-Ah Gallery in 1998. This exhibition was the first time the artist presented her work to the public. Because the work creates an image as text and forms a pixel unit with dots, it gives a different feeling from existing painting, so I thought that people felt it anew and received a good response.

After presenting his work in this exhibition, the artist gained confidence and confidence in his work.

Participated in the exhibition 《Oriental Metaphor》 (2006, Alternative Space Loop, Seoul, Korea) in 2006. 11 artists from Korea, China, Japan participated and toured in Korea, China, and Japan. As Asian art begins to play an active part on the world stage, “Why is contemporary Asian art attracting attention?” This exhibition was planned from the question.

In 2014, Doosan Gallery Seoul participated in the two-person exhibition 《CLOSE-UP》 with artist Ham Jin (2014, Doosan Gallery, Seoul, Korea). Yoo Seungho presents a painting in which small letters written in ink on paper are gathered to create a landscape.

Through the works of Yoo Seungho and Ham Jin, who individually reveal their distinct styles by employing methods of expansion and repetition, and reduction and transformation, this exhibition presents viewers with a perceptive experience that differs depending on the distance from which one views an artwork, and brings viewers face-to-face with the hidden world that exists beneath an image’s surface.

In addition, 《Beginning of New Era》 (2009, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea), 《Korean Alphabet: The Art of Inspiration and Interaction》 (2013, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea), 《Hangeul Calligraphy x Latin Typography》 (2016, Seoul Arts Center Seoul Calligraphy Art Museum, Seoul, Korea), 《The Elegance of Silence》 (2005, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan), etc. Participated in several group exhibitions held at home and abroad.

Awards (Selected)

The artist won Excellency Reward at the 5th Kongsan Art Festival in 1998 and the 22nd ‘The 22th Suk Nam Arts Prize’ in 2002.

The 22th Suk Nam Arts Prize is selected by the Suk Nam Art and Culture Foundation for young artists under the age of 35, and the artist was selected at the young age of 28.

Collections (Selected)

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), Burger Collection (Hong Kong, Hong Kong) Seoul Museum of Art, (Seoul, Korea), Doosan Gallery (Seoul, Korea), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, USA), other collections have been.

Originality & Identity

Yoo Seungho argues that “Segmenting, deconstructing, and rendering meaningless is the essence of my work”. Rather than presupposing the subject, he delivers and twists the established meaning to develop filming that appeals to primitive play and intuition. His art is based on ‘writing-drawing’.

He composes the images with his imagination as well as the pen writing with tiny words on the screen repeatedly. For example, his representative series ‘Text Landscape’ completes images of Chinese landscapes with small words that seemingly are not related to each other.

However, in some of his works, words and form images do not have a direct relationship. In his series ‘echowords’, the landscape is reconstructed using words with tunes or the playful words of the artist’s unique ideas. The worlds inside the artwork remove the meaning and weight that the artist referred from the original one. Furthermore, the old paintings are recontextualized by injecting a modern way of thinking, which reveals the artist’s unique humor.

In his solo exhibition, 《Yuchihan》(Gallary Plant, Seoul), held in 2010, he shows his works where he applies his colour dots. Although it is a basic unit of modeling, an image using a point gives a meaning of abstraction, unlike the common character arithmetic. This is the result of Yoo Seungho applying the principle of hieroglyphs in reverse, establishing an arbitrary relationship between letters and mages, and then transforming them several times.

In the ‘Hypertext’ series, letters and images are placed in an organically close relationship. Yoo Seungho focuses on loose associations and repetitions before the meaning of the text is defined, and he expands this point to a ‘play of sight’ and a ‘play of words’ to deepen the poetic potential of his work.

In his solo exhibition 《Head to toe》(2017, P21, Seoul), he presents disproportionately large objects, such as calligraphy shapes using cursive characters using the typeface of Jeonghee KIM, Suckbong, Buckshong Hwi jong. In another exhibition 《Miss Lamella》(CR collective, Seoul), he presents a canvas painting in which letters float more freely in the space of the screen. It uses the same methods as Yoo Seungho’s previous work as a starting point. However, he creates new landscape artworks by using pen ink smears on the screen as coincidental outcomes.

In Yoo Seungho’s work, the meaning of countless letters/symbols and the meanings of images created by those letters/symbols come and go between collision and overlap, separation and combination. This implies the mutual reflexivity of perception and language. At the same time, this highlights the fluid relations between text and image.

As a result, it can be interpreted as a ‘process of blurring the boundaries,’ and by doing so, between subject and background, which explores the possibilities of different directions for art.

Style & Contents

The audience who sees Yoo Seungho’s work for the first time is overwhelmed by the labour-intensive chain of letters or pointillism.

An image that looks like a single landscape or word from a distance appears as a sum of countless letters, dots, and shapes when you get closer. At this time, the audience watches the reproduction of the past landscape artworks and, at the same time, reads the image in which the letters and signs are intertwined. In the process of reading, the audience enters the world of language play unique to Yoo Seungho’s art world.

“My play is to let heavy meanings flow lightly and float freely in the space of the screen. In the end, into the dream where only pleasure, instinct, pleasure, and humour retain…So the text and images represented on the screen are playing with me, laughing ‘hehehe’ ”

Another method of his work, which compares his work to play, is for “light usage”. However, while the form is brought in from Western masterpieces, all private contexts like painting techniques, ideas, and theories are excluded. By filling the vacant space with visually cheerful language, it becomes a picture to be seen, read, and heard.

On the other hand, Yoo Seungho only used a pen to mainly produce black and white images, but he also tried to install a fluorescent screen in 2017, after 《Hypertext 》(2012, Nanji Gallery, Seoul).

Constancy & Continuity

Since his debut, Yoo Seungho has been recognized for his innovativeness and originality. He breaks down the boundary between image and text, which has been considered to be divided in the long history of art. He further developed a painting in which visual, perceptual, and auditory elements were overlapped in various ways, establishing himself in the contemporary painting reality.

The artist says that it is important to know the origin of “What they were like in the past, What kind of thoughts they had, and How they made art”.

So he continues his exploration of traditional oriental paintings and calligraphy. Additionally, the artist approaches not only the words of Hangeul but also the world of English and the hieroglyphs that are the origin of many letters. It is the world of language most similarly in contact with images.

The source of his work never dries up as he breathes new life into the old by reinterpreting the origins and traditions with his imagination and associative powers.

The fact that he stimulates various human senses by adding humour to the intuition and imagination that transcends the past and present may be the reason why his work is fonded with inclusiveness beyond borders.

In 2005, Yoo Seungho was sold at HKD 564,000 (approximately USD 72,000), twice the estimated price as a character arithmetic work at Christie’s auction in Hong Kong. He also received favourable reviews from the Hong Kong Basel Art Fair and Abu Dhabi Art Fair, in which he participated in 2016. He received strong attention from these fairs and markets.

Artist_K-Artist

Yoo Seungho's Solo Exhibition "FROM HEAD TO TOE" on view through November 25, 2017, at P21

October 25, 2017

P21

As Zygmunt Bauman observes and explains in an extrasensory manner, the contemporary society is liquid in its characteristics. The rigid social standards and ideologies have been collapsed as if they were melted down, and the absolute standard has lost its authority. The foundation and boundary disappear as they become liquid, and diverse fields and values cross and influence each other. Everything truly has become liberated.

On the other hand, the flexible autonomy of liquidity has increased the instability of the society. The power to resist has also become liquid, causing a number of individuals to bear such an unstable state. However, many contemporary artists have been staying in a liquid state and pursuing unrefined circumstances. They are resisting the instability of the era of liquidity and the new authorities of this time in different ways.

In YOO Seungho’s work, the liquidity of the contemporary society is strongly present. Although the artist deals with firm and concrete forms such as letters and images, two contrasting elements cross and change into each other while the composition of the canvas is as liquid as fluid. The word ‘뇌출혈’(cerebral hemorrhage) becomes ‘natural,’ and ‘natural’ becomes a figure of a mountain to form a sublime landscape where a part of the canvas becomes a bird before anyone recognizes and flies away towards the other end of the canvas.

Most of the images flow down toward the bottom of the canvas, becoming a surrounding landscape where the common people stand. The movement also operates in the opposite direction. Most of the previous criticism on YOO’s work focused on the relationship between letters and images in his work. However, there are many more contrasting relations lurking in his work. There are an array of deficient substances, such as different languages, tradition and modernity, poem and painting, meaning and figure, abstraction and figurativeness, surface and depth, and expression and confession, which are elements that construct YOO Seungho’s canvas. Although these elements are often read as a wordplay, playful scribbles, or a way of presenting humor, one can observe how painted letters or images change and are transformed into the other, which leads to a realization that such a process seems natural as if it was done as an inevitable phenomenon than an unnatural attempt intended by the artist.

Such a process seems to be contained within different elements as if a larva becomes a moth which then lays eggs. Different elements seem to be moving toward each other while bearing the fundamental deficiency inside them as in the relationship between oneself and the others, lovers, or ultimately life and death. In this sense, the artist seems to satisfy the demand and deficiency of letters and images that struggle to become the other on the canvas while he blankly gazes them and uses his brush at a proper timing.

In the current exhibition From Head to Toe, most of the works are paintings have letters in a cursive style. The transition from the style of pen writing to that of brush writing deserves a notable attention. It is true that the artist used the same style in his previous solo exhibition Shaking Your Hair Loose (Perigee Gallery, 2015). His 2005 work I go also showed a glimpse of the style. However, a series of works that employ brush writing started in a work titled Ddeok♨ (2015), a work exhibited in The Tradition is the Future (Ilju & Seonhwa Gallery (now Sehwa Museum of Art), 2016). The work appropriates the writing style called Haengcho(行草) from HAN Seok Bong, a calligrapher from the mid-Joseon period. After the exhibition, YOO started employing brush writing as a major component of his work. In fact, this change seems to be a natural progression of his artistic style since most of his previous works share similarities with the style of cursive writing.

Moreover, YOO produced many works that copied paintings by Guo Xi (郭熙) or Fan Kuan (范寬) from the Northern Song Dynasty period. The cursive writing style also appeared in the same period of these artists. With an intention to better express the energy embedded in letters, the artist made a primary sketch where the overall shape and composition were modified from the original writing by enlarging and moving certain strokes. He then painted the sketch on a large rice paper. The dance of thin lines was static yet vigorous to resemble a movement made by a dancer, leading to an impression that the energy contained in the cursive writing of HAN Seok Bong was completed in full by YOO Seungho. The artist confessed that he himself felt strangely excited and captivated while he hung Ddeok♨ for about a month on a wall in a good light after completing the work. After listening to the story, what the artist confessed does not seem to be that strange. Rather, it is possible to see that such a strange feeling became a motive to start the series of works that employ brush writing.

In fact, letters written in the style of cursive writing are closer to images than letters. As the name of the style (草書, which literally means grass and letter) came from its similarity with the shape of grass, it is a matter of course. Letters written in the cursive style are both liberated and dynamic. As well known, one of the basic principles of Chinese character is hieroglyphic composition. For example, ’象’ (elephant) takes the shape of the animal. ‘草’ (grass)as a radical ‘艹’ that indicates grass or plant when it is combined with other characters. Thus, since Chinese characters are an abstraction of figurative shapes, there is no difficulty in conveying any meaning if a letter is close to the image of its original reference, regardless of how cursive the letter is written. What should stay intact is the shape of the letter itself, though.

Whether it was Huizong (徽宗) of the Northern Song Dynasty, Chusa (秋史) and Seok Bong (石峯) of Joseon period, those that favored the cursive writing style understood that they could come close to the essence of writing ironically by scribbling the letters down. One can also say that they were artists that were confident enough to do so. And YOO Seungho also gives that sense of confidence. The confidence has been shown in what he wrote on his canvases, distorted figures in his works, daring depictions of erotic jokes that one might observe in obscene pictures (春畵, a particular term for erotic paintings produced during Joseon period), and rather indifferent titles he made for static landscape paintings, which reminded of his way of speaking. The current series with the cursive writing style shows more of that confidence. In the works in the series lie energies that are tranquil yet bold and feeble yet massive that one can feel from the back of a farmer who finished his job during the day and riding an oxcart or a smell of earth from the traces of moving on a ridge between rice paddies. Such energies are beautifully conveyed on the canvas as if it was done by a person full of confidence in a relaxed manner.

A poet and a scholar of Korean literature CHO Ji Hun once mentioned that the Korean aesthetic consciousness can be found in the notion of ‘멋’ (Meot), which means sapidity, taste, or a general appreciation of beautiful things and actions. CHO finds Meot in lines that are curved rhythmically, distorted shapes, and optimism that consistently sustains humor. Further, CHO tells that the authentic meaning of the term is seen in the ‘beauty of transcending formality’ (超格美), which is “a formality that enters and escapes from a formality.” In this sense, the cursive writing is the most appropriate form to express the beauty of transcending formality since it is to mimic shapes to create letters that transcend the given frame and even become figures that contain movement.

“Lies behind the mask, the path.” The line is from HWANG Ji Woo’s poem “503.” I wrote it down while I was listening to a statement made by an aesthetician where he quoted the poem. I was reminded of the line when I was observing YOO Seungho’s fool (2017). What catches one’s eyes in this long neon-colored canvas that stretches more than three meters is a letter ‘屮’ (grass). It is the same letter that Chusa wrote for a signboard hung at the entrance of Dasan Chodang (茶山草堂, a residence building used by JEONG Yakyong (1762-1836) during his exile (1800-1818)).

On the signboard, the letter for grass is written straightly to remind of a trident while the letter signifying a mountain is tilted like a piece of rice cake while it is supposed to be grandiose. This can be an allusion of the ruler and the exile, but what is also evident is that the letters are a clear expression of the people and their potential power. In addition to grass, YOO Seungho’s canvas is composed elegant lines that are both thin and thick, conveying the strength and weakness of force. Strokes of thin lines follow the elegant lines, forging an imagery of grass that provides a space to the path that has been followed by a brush. Lines that deviate from the standard shape of letters become paths by the artist’s brush strokes. To find zen hidden in emptiness shall be more difficult than finding it from visible forms.

When I asked the artist about why he started using brushes instead of pens, he gave this response. “Now is the time to use brush writing.” If a path is laid in front of oneself, one should follow the path. The path might be of following the tradition or being adapted to the society. However, there is no fixed path from the start. If a painter has faith in himself and follows his way, a path shall be paved. YOO Seungho overcame an immense pressure he felt as an artist and is now paving his path toward becoming a seeker of truth. And this might be a reason I strongly sensed liquidity as I observed works in the exhibition including fool. In YOO Seungho’s work, the new authority born in the age of liquidity and the simple and pure movement of the common people that resist that authority turn the canvas into a state of liquidity.

“FROM HEAD TO TOE
2017.10.26 - 2017.11.25
Tue – Fri 11:00 am – 6:00 pm, Sat 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
P21
74, Hoenamu-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea

Articles

Artist_K-Artist PERIGEE ARTIST #5 Yoo Seungho : "Shaking your Hair loose"-Childishly and Splendidly Frolicking 2015.06.04