Artists

Young-Jun Tak

Press release

Young-jun Tak responds to six words that clarify the mentality behind his work’s noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.

If I were asked to categorize Young-jun Tak as an artist (1989, Seoul) I would likely include him in that relatively small company of those who are instinctively interested in representing the highest spiritual aspirations of human beings and their multiple communities. As a matter of fact these greater topics have been inspiring a certain kind of artistic production since the dawn of time. But those artists who openly have dared to deal with them tend to share some common traits over time. The formula created by theorist of neo-classicism Johann Joachim Winckelmann is likely the best way to nail it: noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. Thanks to this effective string of words the German archaeologist, whose celebrative cenotaph still enriches the San Giusto Cathedral in Trieste along with the nearby cosy museum dedicated to him, has been able to epitomize a precise artistic mentality, more than a mere aesthetics. And it’s enough to visit the Tak’s website (link here) to realize that he has been walking along these lines since the beginning of his cursus honorum, already including the Berlin Biennale (2020), the Biennale de Lyon (2022), the New York’s High Line (2023), the Julia Stoschek Foundation (2023), the Atelier Hermes in Seoul (2023), and the St. Moritz Art Film Festival, which prized him last year as the SONGEUN Art Award, who gave him the Grand Prize, also did last year. Therefore, instead of providing evidence that the reader could easily spot by exploring the articulated body of works that Tak was able to put together in the last decade or so, I found it more appropriate to propose him some keywords in order to let the artistic mentality under question to spontaneously emerge from the artist’s own approach to the issue. The following line came to me a few days after I dropped him these few keywords as a perfectly in tune forward to what I was expecting and then followed: “I try to extend my childhood perspective, beyond the safety of my mother’s knees, to the wider world around me.” Please note that the images accompanying the following artist’s words show paintings from the Stressful Painting series paired with real scale ceramic reproductions of the artist’s mother’s back knees (2017-2018, 2024). The sculptures’ hanging points correspond to the actual height of her knees from the ground. Through a five degrees scale, the 12 paintings in the series visualize the artist’s monthly level of stress in using day-by-day social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, from March, 2017 till March, 2018.

Text by Stefano Pirovano