Artists

Jongsuk Yoon

Press release

Jongsuk Yoon’s third solo exhibition at the gallery bears the concise and cryptic title Han. If you ask the artist, who grew up in South Korea and has been living in Germany since the 1990s, what the title means, she will give you a vivid description of the environment that continues to have a formative impact on her to this day and that is the focus of this exhibition: the landscape of her home country of Korea.

According to Yoon, the Korean word han is difficult to translate. It has many different meanings: for example, han is the short form of an earlier name for Seoul, and it is also the name of the fourth largest river in the country, Hangang, or the Han River. Yoon’s abstracted landscapes are products of her memory or imagination, or they are based on photographs. She composes these landscapes out of atmospheric, open color fields that she juxtaposes, superimposes, and joins together in a dynamic arrangement. Their color palette ranges from bright red, to delicate hues of blue, to rich yellow. On the other hand, Yoon employs gray and earth tones sparingly, but with great effect. Her varied application of paint evokes a certain sense of restlessness. The different types of brush strokes define the individual color fields, lending them volume and giving the picture spatial depth. Once in a while, Yoon accentuates certain areas with black lines. “The spontaneous, vibrant line reveals the pace at it was painted and lets you experience the feeling that evolved in the process,” she says.