Following a show in New York last year, Yun Hyong-Keun’s umber and ultramarine abstracts come to Belgium for an exhibition at the Axel Vervoordt Gallery.Titled “Passage of Time,” the exhibition is being presented at a time of critical revaluation for the unofficial art movement he was a part of generally and the artist specifically.2015 marked the publication of the first comprehensive monograph of the artist’s work, building on the critical interest around Yun Hyong-Keun and his fellow Dansaekhwa.Although not defined by any manifesto or self-defined artistic rules, practitioners of Dansaekhwa often exhibited and even painted together.“Dansaekhwa” is a Korean noun which roughly translates as “monochrome” or “single color,” and has been used subsequently by critics to describe South Korean artists whose minimalist works are united by their use of either single colors or extremely limited color palettes. As such, the term is often used to describe artists such as Lee Ufan, Park Seo-Bo, and of course Yun Hyong-Keun himself.Although the word “dansaekhwa” may literally mean “single-color,” it is with two colors that the artist is associated with: umber and ultramarine. Well, three colors actually — the artist liked to layer turpentine-thinned layers of the two colors to create inky blacks almost impossible to recreate in a photograph.“Inky” is an apt word. Yun’s first inspiration for these works was 16th-/17th-century calligrapher Kim Jeong-Hui and his delicate orchid artworks in black ink. His second, related to those orchid paintings, was nature. Umber and ultramarine were chosen as the color of the sky and of the earth respectively, and by combining them Yun achieved a harmony between sky and earth, giving his work its impact.However, much as in nature this is an imperfect harmony. The turpentine was added to the paint because it absorbed into the support (first canvas, then later hemp and linen) quicker than into the paint, leaving almost spectral auras around the rectangles of solid color. This introduced a sense of time into his work, as well as giving his paints the texture of the inks he had so admired in Kim’s work.Axel Vervoordt Gallery shows Kim’s most abstract rectilinear form paintings in its show, set in dramatic contrast to the brutal whites of its exposed brick walls, with the nature-inspired balance of the work at its best effect against this unnatural, industrial background.Yun Hyong-Keun runs through March 3 at Axel Vervoordt Gallery.
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