Born in Cheongwon-gun (present day Cheongju), North Chungcheong Province, Yun Hyong-keun, is one of the most important Korean artists in the late 20th century. Graduated from Hongik University in 1957, he began teaching art in high schools and held his first solo exhibition in 1966 at the Press Center Gallery.

 

It was not until 1973 that Yun dedicated himself full-time to painting. Notably, it was during this period that he began to produce works in his own distinctive style. Placing a thick cotton or hemp canvas on the floor, Yun drew broad lines from top to bottom, adding his oil colors layer upon layer until the outer edges of the form glowed with deep near-black. In these early years, Yun explained the thesis of his paintings as “The Gate of Heaven and Earth.” For Yun, who used only two alternating colors, blue and umber, “blue [was] the color of heaven, while umber [was] the color of earth” (Artist Note, 1971). Painted with a minimum of artificiality or superfluity, Yun’s works implicit the humble but graceful characteristics of nature in a method of modern painting well appreciated both in the East and West, which evokes the atmosphere of an old tree that has gone through the hardships of the years or the earth with a warm and rustic smell. Yun’s later works somehow became even simp$ler and more stringent in terms of their form, color, and process, but with only minor variations, Yun continued with this artistic practice for about 40 years.

 

Moreover, the self-confident but modest, humble but dignified personality that Yun sought to reflect in his art gives the works a deep and peaceful resonance. Yun remained thoroughly faithful to a way of life that is uniquely suited to his personal idiosyncrasies. Therefore, it is often said that one can sense a strong self-imposed discipline oozing out from his works. The result of Yun’s weighty brushstrokes of a trained body and mind is a peculiar presence built out of real energy fields and vector forces on the physical material surface of a canvas, invisible to the eye but present.

 

Yun participated in various international exhibitions including Sao Paulo Biennale in 1969 and 1975, Venice Biennale in 1995, and Gwangju Biennale in 2000. For the first time amongst Dansaekhwa artists, a huge retrospective of Yun was held at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul in 2018, which traveled to Palazzo Fortuny, Venice in 2019. Yun’s paintings are in the permanent collections of National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Busan Museum of Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Fukuoka Art Museum, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Mie Prefectural Art Museum, M+, Tate Modern, Chinati Foundation, Art Institute of Chicago, and Cleveland Museum of Art.