Heaven and Earth: Yun Hyong-keun at Hastings Gallery
'Since everything on earth ultimately returns to earth, everything is just a matter of time. When I remember that this also applies to me and my paintings, it all seems so trifling.'
June 16, 2023
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
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Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
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Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Few colours feature in the paintings of Yun Hyong-keun. But soft, seeping blues, the hues of his early works from the 1970s, open his exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, the Korean artist’s first public exhibition in the UK. They reflect the meeting point of sky and sea - or ‘heaven and earth’ – and the Hastings Stade which they would overlook, were it not for the gallery’s blackout blinds.
Coming of age in the Korea of Japanese colonial rule, Yun was expelled from art school, imprisoned, and tortured during the transitional period between US military and South Korean rule, and during the Korean War (1950-1953) which followed.
During the post-war dictatorship, South Korea was largely isolated from global art markets and movements. South Korean artists responded by creating their own patterns, derived from both Korean traditions and conventions, and contemporary works of abstraction. Yun was a founder member and leading figure of Korea's Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement; yet he did not fully dedicate himself to his painting career until his mid-forties.
Targeted and detained again in the early 1970s, Yun responded with his 'gate of heaven and earth' series, using only two colours, ultramarine and umber. 'My painting changed completely in 1973, because of the anger I felt when I was released from Seodaemun Prison,’ said the artist. ‘Before that, I had used colours, but then I came to detest colours and anything vibrant. That's why my works became dark. I was using the painting to curse and vent all of the spite that was inside me.'
The product was the artist’s distinctive style, informed by local environments and also Western art. In the early 1980s, he relocated his family to Paris for three years, and he would later meet with Donald Judd. In New York, he’d encounter Mark Rothko. Yun also remained deeply influenced by the scholar and calligrapher Chusa Kim Jeong-hui, employing pigment diluted with turpentine to create compositions which recall traditional East Asian ink-wash paintings.
Yun’s signature rectilinear compositions are marked by their simple palette of umber – the colour of the earth – and ultramarine – the colour of heaven. Still, what his paintings ‘lack’ in colour are more than compensated for in their shades of complexity.
Indeed, it is a totally different experience to see a single Yun painting – as in the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, or at the Tate – than it is to see them in a group. The latter is weightier; here, deprived of any additional captions, we are forced to focus on the details, revealing the diversity in this seemingly repetitive style. The stark, straight-line works from 2007 and 1999 seem tightly constrained, the elongated forms in his early umber works almost overwhelming.
Often, the artist would spend months layering paint down to create great fields of intense darkness, each coat contributing to his works’ physical sense of time. The more he worked on a canvas, the blurrier and more ambiguous his lines became – as though to reflect how we can return to and rethink things over and again, without achieving clarity, but perhaps understanding their complexity.
Yun’s biography and works bear the traumas in Korean history; his anger and sadness, and own will to stand against injustice, play out in his practice. By the 1990s, his blurred boundaries become hard edges, with blackish umbers dominating the canvas.
The Hastings Contemporary has covered its windows and skylights to ‘enhance the meditative silence’ of these works. At times, it is a truly contemplative, almost religious space; but one, unfortunately, interrupted by the thoroughfare of chattering people.
Yun Hyong-keun’s paintings gained global attention from the 1990s, most often for their contrast to the Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Agnes Martin, and more widely Western Minimalism. We see a similar movement in Japan, with the European historicisation of the Gutai Art Association as a ‘Japanese version of Informel’.; His works speak directly to Korean culture – both cultural and political - while existing in dialogue with 20th Century American and European abstract artists. (He would modestly respond to those who coined him a leader of Korean Minimalism).
Above all, Yun’s works are in dialogue with nature, a theme shared by many contemporary galleries in Hastings. At Burton Gallery, G. Calvert’s snail-like Marina Scenes recall the artist Hilma af Klint; Dragica Carlin’s swirling oils on canvas at Rogue Gallery are more dynamic, miniature works of minimalism. (Many artists, of course, refer to the social and cultural context of post-war Britain, and their influences of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also currently on view in Hastings Contemporary.)
But To Rise and Fall with the Heron, a group exhibition of artists from St. Leonard’s in Hastings, and Norway, is the ideal companion to Yun Hyong-keun. Its title references the meeting point of land and sea – the heron’s home – alongside the ebb and flow of the tides.
Gunhild Sannes’ great canvases and textiles share the same transcendental quality of Yun’s works, softened in texture and tones. In this beach-house-cum-studio, and site-responsive collaboration, all four artists exchange with each other and the natural environment. Twenty-first century conversations, with echoes down the waterfront back to Hastings’ Old Town.
Yun Hyong-keun is on view at Hastings Contemporary until 10 October 2023.
Burton Gallery is open Fridays-Mondays.
A Moveable Feast: Dragica Carlin, Russell Heron, Joe Packer, Lucy Temple, Justin Weeks is on view at Rogue Gallery until 2 July 2023.
To Rise and Fall with the Heron: Miroslava Vecerova, Maya Ramnarine, Gunhild Sannes, Jara Markin is on view at Electro Studios Project Space.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
