[Gallery Walk] There Are No Paths in Yoo Youngkuk's Mountains

Seoul Museum of Art Presents "Yu Youngkuk: The Mountain Exists Within Me"
The Density of Korean Abstraction Through 178 Works
An Inner Order Built with Primary Colors and Geometry

Beneath the black ceiling, a red mountain quietly sharpened its edges. This was the first-floor exhibition hall of the Seosomun Main Building at the Seoul Museum of Art. During the exhibition tour that followed the press conference on the 18th, visitors found their steps curiously slowed. Even before any commentary, the canvases were already speaking volumes. A single triangle became a peak, an obliquely cut plane became a ridge, and the reds and blues did not depict the colors of a landscape, but rather the hues of time long compressed and endured.

'Yu Youngguk: The Mountain Is Within Me' Part 5, Jeong-gyeong, Photo by Sangtae Kim_Seoul Museum of Art.

There are no paths on Yoo Youngkuk’s mountains. No hiking trails, trees, or people. The name “mountain” remains, but the nature before our eyes has been erased. Instead, lines and planes, colors and boundaries, balances and collisions fill the canvas. This is the first key to viewing this exhibition. Yoo Youngkuk was less a painter who depicted mountains, and more an artist who borrowed the motif of mountains to experiment with how far painting itself could be taken and solidified.

Starting from May 19, the Seoul Museum of Art presents a retrospective marking the 110th anniversary of Yoo Youngkuk’s birth, titled “Yoo Youngkuk: The Mountain Is Within Me.” This is the inaugural exhibition in the museum’s newly launched “Korean Modern Masters” series. A total of 178 works are featured according to detailed counts, including 115 oil paintings, 12 drawings, 4 reliefs, 8 photographs, and various archival materials. Among these are 15 pieces that have never before been shown to the public.

The exhibition does not follow a straightforward chronological narrative. Its starting point is neither Uljin in 1916 nor Tokyo in 1935. Instead, it begins in 1964—the year Yoo Youngkuk, at the age of 49, held his first solo exhibition. This was the moment when an artist who had been at the center of avant-garde groups in Korean abstract art, such as the New Realism Group, Modern Art Association, Contemporary Artists Invitational Exhibition, and Shinsanghoe, broke away from group activities and turned toward his own work and time.

Youngkuk Yoo, Work, 1968, Oil on canvas, 136×136cm. Youngkuk Yoo Foundation for Art and Culture.

This choice causes the exhibition’s narrative to fold back on itself. It begins with the 1964 solo exhibition, then traces back to his avant-garde experiments at Bunka Gakuin in Tokyo in the 1930s, before returning to the geometric abstraction of the 1960s and ’70s, and finally to the lyrical abstraction of his later years. The exhibition does not arrange his life in simple sequence; rather, it seeks to trace why he ultimately entered the “mountain within himself.”

The atmosphere in the early sections is low and dark. Small drawings, photographs, and reliefs are arranged along the walls, while documentary materials are neatly organized at the center of the gallery. Here, Yoo Youngkuk is not yet the “mountain painter.” Instead, he is a seeker of form. Moving between painting, relief, and photography, he clings not to the outward appearance of things, but to their underlying structure. The mountain was never his predetermined destination. Rather, it became the most precise name for the formal experiments he pursued over a long period.

As visitors move into the brighter spaces, the temperature of the paintings changes. The red planes warm the canvas, while the blue planes restrain that heat. Yellow and green push against each other, creating tension at the center of the canvas. Yoo Youngkuk’s colors are never decorative. They do not blur prettily, nor do they flow sentimentally. Color creates boundaries, and those boundaries become the body of the mountain. The primaries are hot, but the compositions remain austere. The geometry is cold, yet oddly vibrant. This contradiction is the driving force of Yoo Youngkuk’s painting.

During his study abroad period in Japan, Yoo Youngkuk, late 1930s to early 1940s, Yoo Youngkuk Art and Culture Foundation.

His mountains originated from those of his hometown, Uljin, and its sea. Yet, they are not direct transcriptions of Uljin’s scenery. Peaks are rendered as triangles, the sea as horizontal planes, and sunsets and light as the pressure of color. Nature is not erased, but compressed into a more solid form. The less he seeks resemblance, the more deeply the painting resonates. Yoo Youngkuk’s abstraction stands upon this paradox.

At the press conference, Yoo Jin, director of the Yoo Youngkuk Art and Culture Foundation, explained that the “mountain” in the exhibition’s title refers not to a visible mountain, but to one projected within the mind. This interpretation gains persuasiveness in the latter part of the exhibition. After undergoing surgery to implant a pacemaker in 1977, Yoo Youngkuk repeatedly faced major surgeries and hospitalizations. Yet, his late works do not tilt toward traces of illness. Instead, his palette grows more subdued, his mountains softer, and the depth of his canvases greater.

The easel and chair from his studio, placed in the later section, create a modest yet striking scene. Rather than the myth of a master, it is daily life that comes to the fore. For Yoo Youngkuk, painting was less an explosion of inspiration than the daily act of sitting before the canvas at the same time each day.

'Yoo Youngkuk: The Mountain Is Within Me' Part 2 exterior, Photo by Sangtae Kim_Seoul Museum of Art.

He was an artist whose work only sold for the first time at the age of 59, and who did not abandon the rhythm of his studio even after surgery. This fact does not make his art more tragic; rather, it renders it drier and more resilient. The mountain was not a subject for inspiration, but the result of repeated labor.

By the end of the exhibition, the mountain is no longer nature, nor geometry, nor memory. His 1994 works “Mountain-Red” and “Mountain-Blue” stand facing each other like barriers of different colors. The red mountain and blue mountain are not two faces of a landscape, but the two poles of the world Yoo Youngkuk clung to throughout his life’s work. Fire and water, tension and silence, density and emptiness collide within a single canvas. Here, the mountain is no longer an external object, but an order established from within.

Though this is a retrospective, the exhibition does not stop at commemorating the past. An audio guide featuring pianist Son Yeol-eum and broadcaster Peter Vint is available, and in September, a Seoul Light collaboration will project Yoo Youngkuk’s colors onto the exterior of DDP. Yet, at the heart of the exhibition remains painting. In an era when technology rapidly creates and erases images, Yoo Youngkuk’s canvases show the depth that emerges when one person persistently pursues the same form over a long period of time.

Work 1992, first unveiled at this exhibition. Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation.

The mountain was never outside. Yoo Youngkuk brought it onto the canvas, and then transformed it into an inner order. Thus, what visitors encounter at this exhibition is not a landscape of mountains, but a record of one artist’s daily life, forms, and tenacity, left under the name of the mountain. There are no paths on that mountain. Instead, there are planes that reveal themselves only to those who gaze for a long while. The exhibition runs through October 25.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.