In Jongsuk Yoon's paintings, translucent shapes, colours, and lines expand into poignant abstractions evocative of nature which the artist describes as 'mind landscapes' or 'mindscapes'.
Read MoreBorn in Onyang, South Korea, Yoon moved to Europe in 1995 to study at the Kunstakademie Münster (1996). She later studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1997–2001), and at the Chelsea College of Art in London (2004–2005). The artist lives and works in Düsseldorf.
From her early embroidered acrylic paintings, Yoon has increasingly moved towards large-scale drawings and paintings that integrate elements of Korean folk art and traditional ink painting with western oil painting.
Yoon works on several canvases at once, moving between different parts of a painting. Upon painting preliminary marks or swathes of colour, the artist will leave the canvases for a period of time before returning to rework sections. Yoon employs bold gestures across the surface, and modifies, dilutes, or completely covers previous layers of colour in the process.
Inspired by the landscapes of her hometown and country, the abstracted scenes in Yoon's paintings regularly feature triangular, mountainous shapes, orbs, and amorphous forms reminiscent of clouds.
In Kumgangsan (2019), the eponymous mountain historically famous for its beauty appears as a blue peak, surrounded by pale green and yellow and with an almost indistinguishable moon to its left. The mountain is also in itself a politically-charged symbol, being located in Gangwon-do in North Korea.
Yellow to Pink, Yoon's 2022 solo exhibition at Vienna's Galerie nächst St. Stephan, featured further mountain paintings. Inspired by the bright pink azalea flowers that engulf the mountains in South Korea during spring, Azalea Mountain (2022) depicts a central plane of pink flanked by yellow, orange, and a small slab of turquoise.
Yoon also paints murals, exploring the relationship between individual forms that merge with one another at a larger scale. Gang San (2018), the artist's first South Korean solo exhibition at Seoul's Art Sonje Center, showed Yoon incorporating vivid red and black into her work, alongside a more muted colour palette commonly seen in her later paintings.
A range of hues mix and emerge in Yoon's paintings. In Wall Paintings, her 2020 solo presentation at the Nordic Watercolor Museum in Skärhamn, a mural features a translucent cloud of blue, through which a base layer of red remains visible. To its left are triangular shapes in opaque black and grey, the latter a result of repeatedly painting white over black.
Jongsuk Yoon has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Select solo exhibitions include Yellow to Pink, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna (2022); Wall Paintings, The Nordic Watercolor Museum, Skärhamn (2020); Gang San, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2018); Mind Landscapes, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve (2017).
Select group exhibitions include What the moon can tell you has been said by the sun, Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague (2021); Irony and Idealism, Kunsthalle Münster, Münster (2018); Irony and Idealism, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, and KF Gallery, Seoul (2017).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022
