If we look at the art of the Far East in our own times we will find two clearly divided tendencies that seem to arose of necessity, and are battling for supremacy. The first is a tendency toward modernism, with an emphasis on the Western interpretation of that idea or ideal. It is as though the industrial and technical accomplishments of the culturally 'superior'- i.e., more advanced in the evolutionary process-nations could be transferred without change to the world of art. Thus, it is earlier in the century that School of Paris painting was introduced in one fashion or another into the artistic life of the Philippines, China, Japan and Korea, as a sort of Impressionism or Symbolism, with an Oriental flavoring that makes the Western style into something exotic. On occasion it could be assimilated to the forms of art already in the tradition, as Fauvism into the 'literary-men's painting', and so tamed into an academy. Or it could remain a completely imported product and so never be quite a true expression of this particular people.

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The equal and opposite tendency can be seen in the firm rejection of everything foreign precisely because it is foreign. So 'traditional' styles are adopted defensively, in order to produce increasingly weaker versions of what once was a viable and strong art. Like a craze for folk art, this reverse academy is also kind of internal tourism, and when the ordinary foreign visitor sees this, he mistakenly regards it as the 'real' art of the country. Yet it is another academy, nevertheless.

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It seems to me that both positions suffer from a lack of real consideration of the problem of how really good art is born. Its parents are freedom and constraint. One cannot escape the restraint of one's own roots, whether regional, national or personal, and still retain a living, free originality. And this fact is more poignantly true in the Far East perhaps than in the West.

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Yun Hyong-keun's acceptance of this fact is brought out clearly in his basic attitude to his art, when, he says that his main interest ins in living. Art comes after life as a natural process, as natural as the assimilation of food into the body. The unreflectiveness of his own art amounts to a very positive giving of himself to the experience of life in his native Korea, as the only possibility given to him for living. We must note that this is no negative rejection of outside influences, but a positive act of embracing life in the concrete.

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His painting is done on linen canvas of a relatively low grade of refinement Good. The first limitation placed upon his art, and one which he embraces and takes supreme advantage of. Into this thin surface, which asserts so strongly its own presence, he soaks his oil colors layer upon thin layer, after the first layer of turpentine has stained the straw-colored cloth ever so slightly. The color is added more and more until the outer edges of the canvas glow with a deep near-black, which in his recent works is made up of umber and indigo blue.

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His earlier works contained roughly aligned stripes of relatively bright colors, and are vaguely reminiscent of the work of the American painters Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, the artists with whom Yun felt most affinity when he recently wandered through the United States and Europe looking at the museums. Although when one sees the decorations of the Buddhist temples in Korea one is strongly aware of a decorative color tradition of great intensity, it would seem that Korean artists of our own time do not take readily to anything approaching primary colors in meaningful work, and so it is that from 1972 Yun gradually veiled the brightness and finally dropped almost the entire palette, leaving only the present umber and blue. And these colors are so dark that they are hardly distinguishable from pure black. It must be added, though, that even when his color range was wider and brighter, he never concerned himself either with Rothko's surrealism of light, or with Louis' color experiments.

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One area of his work that fascinates me is the possibility of opposites coexisting. The center of his present works is blank canvas, far lighter than the edges. And yet there seems to be far more light glowing through the dark pools of color on the side stripes, like deeply stained glass, than there is in the rather dry center, opaque as hay. there is a sense of a symbolic space in the center that gives the paintings the feeling of landscape. Yet this is no real space at all, for there is an equal and opposite tactile sensation that keeps the entire surface extremely close to the viewer and cancels out any possibility of an illusionary space. If the paintings have anything to do with landscape at all, it is a world where all points are equally close to the traveler. They are records of his immediate passage, as he touches each spot with his hand.

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But it seems to me that although some kind of outdoor world is found in Yun's work, what is perhaps more important is the interplay between image and process. One can see the irregular bands of deep color moving down the canvas as a record of the hand's movement, and of the process of staining canvas. That would be hardly enough to engage our attention except for some kind of witness of life, on a rather primitive level. But what brings excitement is the image which is created by this process, almost without an act of will. It all looks so easy as a way of painting. In a casual way he builds up an image so striking that it makes a strong impress upon the visual memory. The impression is not so much of a pattern so much as of a strong presence that moves in upon the viewer even after he has taken his eyes off the painting.

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All this explaining sounds terribly impressionistic, and yet these paintings do produce a strong psychological impression, a real sense of penetrating contact with nature, that is neither description of visual facts of nature nor a romantic mood-making. And in a time of sophisticated painting, it is really something to say that Yun's work is both as tough and painterly as the work of his contemporaries in New York, and at the same time as simple and earthy as the pots for storing spiced vegetable in the countryside of Korea. In this regard it is impossible to separate the paintings from the nature of the man, who presents the atmosphere of a rough and straight forward honesty, and a nature which loathes all decadent and over-sophistication found in some areas of contemporary life in the city. This kind of freshness, both in the man and in his art, is a rough food for the spirit that should continue to nourish.