Jongsuk Yoon: Yellow May
Jongsuk Yoon
Yellow May
1120 Seward Street Los Angeles | 13 July – 17 August 2024Opening Reception Saturday 13 July, 5 – 8 pm
Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Korean-German artist Jongsuk Yoon in the United States.
Born in South Korea in 1965, Yoon relocated to Europe in the early 1990s to study art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under German conceptual artist Fritz Schwegler. After her studies, she settled in Düsseldorf and focused her practice on drawings and paintings that hover in the space between figuration and abstraction. In works on paper, canvas, as well as directly on walls, Yoon creates charged and dreamlike color field landscapes that reflect her interests in both European and American Modernism and East Asian traditions.
For this exhibition, two expansive, mural-sized paintings April Mai (2023) and August (2024) are presented in the Main Gallery. Featuring poetic silhouettes of mountainscapes, they reference the border between North and South Korea, as well as the artist’s own childhood memories. Across a vast and mesmerizing pictorial space, Yoon’s unique approach to painting is found in atmospheric layers of highly gestural and variously textured brushstrokes. The colors, a rich palette of bright yellows, soft fuchsias, and pale blues, are also references to specific memories, such as azalea blossom-covered mountains in the Korean springtime. The disembodied forms of color present this profoundly fraught geopolitical terrain as an anti-monumental, illusory reverie.
"When I paint larger works with larger brushes, giving myself to the brushwork comes naturally. In those moments where the brush moves across the surface, I am there, in a different world." – Jongsuk Yoon, 2022
Born in South Korea in 1965, Jongsuk Yoon moved to Europe in the early 1990s to study art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under German conceptual artist Fritz Schwegler. After her studies, Yoon settled in Düsseldorf and focused her practice on drawings and paintings that hover in the space between figuration and abstraction. In works on paper, canvas, as well as directly on walls, Yoon creates charged and dreamlike color field landscapes that reflect her interests in both European and American Modernism and East Asian traditions.
Yoon is currently the subject of the solo exhibition Kumgangsan at Mumok (Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation) in Vienna, Austria. Past select solo exhibitions include, amongst others, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2021); Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn (2020); Wall Paintings, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2018); Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2017); and Osthaus Museum, Hagen (2015). Her works can be found in many public collections, including Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Sprengel Museum and Museum Ostwall, Dortmund, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany, among others.
Currently on view
The mountain massif Kumgangsan is the inspiration for the mural design by Jongsuk Yoon currently on view at Mumok in Vienna, Austria.
Kumgangsan ("Diamant Mountain"), which today is located on North Korean territory, commemorates the arbitrary division of North and South Korea in 1945 and as such is a symbol of an unresolved geopolitical conflict and its traumatizing aftermath. Yoon‘s painterly approach to this place, which she has never visited herself, combines the paradigms of Western Modernism and East Asian traditions, particularly Korean sansuhwa (“Mountain and Water Paintings“), to create an entirely anti-monumental landscape painting. Diaphanous layers of large-scale, repeatedly smudged color patches, processual traces, and graphic ciphers condense to form panoramic “soul landscapes” (J. Yoon), in which “inner” and “outer” perspectives oscillate.