Installation view of 《Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me》. Photo: Sangtae Kim. ⓒ SeMA
To mark the 110th birth anniversary of Yoo Youngkuk (1916–2002),
a pioneering figure in Korean abstract art, Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) presents
《Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me》, the
most comprehensive retrospective of his work to date, through October 25.
Organized in collaboration with the Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation
and The Chosun Ilbo, the exhibition comprises over 170 works and archival
materials, including pieces that have never been published before, providing a
comprehensive overview of the artist’s work in the fields of painting, relief,
photography, and drawing.
The exhibition also inaugurates SeMA’s newly launched “Korean
Modern Masters” series, a project dedicated to reassessing the achievements of
Korean modern art from a contemporary perspective.
Yoo Youngkuk, the first artist of the series, is a figure who
remained unwavering in his commitment to abstraction―then the avant-garde of
its time―as both a lived practice and an artistic conviction throughout the
turbulent arc of the 20th century of Korean history, including Japanese
colonial rule, the Korean war, democratization, and a compressed economic
growth.
Installation view of 《Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me》. Photo: Sangtae Kim. ⓒ SeMA
The exhibition traces over six decades of Yoo Youngkuk’s career,
from his early experiments with abstract art at Bunka Gakuin in Tokyo in 1935,
to the abstract imagery of his later years. Rather than following a
conventional retrospective, the exhibition enables a more direct encounter with
Yoo Youngkuk’s resolve and commitment, as well as the sublime and the rhythm of
the infinite.
Taking 1964 as a pivotal point, it moves backward and then
forward in time, proposing a distinctive temporal journey. Through this
structure, it offers a layered view of his artistic world, in which the
“mountain” is abstracted through the fundamental elements of point, line,
plane, and color.
Recurring throughout his work, the mountain is at once the
landscape of his hometown, Uljin, a totality of memory, and an inner order
shaped by the balance of line and color. For Yoo, it was not simply an external
subject, but a formal essence rooted in the mind.
Installation view of 《Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me》. Photo: Sangtae Kim. ⓒ SeMA
His work resonates today not only as the achievement of a modern
master but because it opens a window onto its time. The order of beauty he
constructed continues to draw us with visual wonder.
As digital and AI technologies unsettle the very idea of
creation, his painting returns us to a fundamental question: what does it mean
to create? In his late work, a gaze beyond the infinite reveals the sublime
potential of painting.
Like a vast, deep mountain he discovered within himself, his
work remains alive, speaking to us as we search for mountains of our own.
