It is paradox of modern art that as representational elements are eliminated, the potential for an expanded content often increases. Artists who wish to acknowledge a specific cultural heritage may find abstraction more potent than figuration.

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The Korean painter Hyong-keun Yun uses a spare formal vocabulary thar addresses both modernist universals and the more intangible dimensions of cultural identity. Born in 1928, Yun came of age esthetically during the 1950s, in the period of "Art Informelle", the term used to describe Korean abstract Expressionism. His earliest paintings, from the 1960s, explored the expressive power of gesture in defining columnar structures. These reductive investigation of the inherent nature of planes and solids were performed by pigments soaked into unprimed canvases. Not surprisingly, his work of this period bore affinities to that of Mark Rothko and Morris Louis.

By the mid-'70s Yun favored monochrome tonalities, as did many of the Korean artists who are known as the Ecole de Seoul, (the name derived from a series of exhibitions feld at the National Museum of Modern Art). Jettisoning all colors except indigo and umber, he broadened his stained columns into slabs whose divagating oily boundaries kept up an active conversation with the tangent voids.

A few years ago Yun eliminated blue from his palette and concentrated on a range of browns soaked into or set against cotton or linen supports the color of sack cloth.

On a recent visit Korea I noted with enjoyment several examples of Yun's work represented in museum collections, but it was not until I stepped inti a solo exhibition of his grandly scaled and sober paintings that I could concentrate on the nature of their appeal. Here were Minimalist paintings of richly sensual surfaces that radiated a muted ascetic content. Some of the rectangular forms were the color of caramelized sugar, others the tonality of rested metal or dried blood-all visual analogies that embody the passage of time.

Yun's monolithic images are created by the repetitive processes of staining and soaking, as if painting were a sister activity to the workings of nature. He is a master at etherealized boundaries-brown plinths exude loamy halos whose edges seem to have been shaped by attrition. Significantly, the artist has recounted that a chance sighting of a fallen tree slowly decomposing into earth has been of abiding importance to him. In fact, Yun titles all of his recent paintings "Umber", a pigment designation literary derived from the soil.

East Asian critics have commented on the spiritual power of the void in Yun's works, and have pointed out that the paintings echo the feeling of traditional Korean ceramics, so-called "art without technique". This characteristic of artlessness was noted by the painter Lee Ufan, who once described his contemporary's work as "unanalytical, primordial and indescribably nonexistent".

Initially Yun's paintings spoke to me in the same formal language as the Cor-Ten steel structures of Richard Serra. But these solemn canvases also project a powerful spiritual aura, perceptible even to those unfamiliar with specific Korean cultural traditions. As visual meditations on impermanence, their authority is unrivaled.

Judith Stein, 1992

* from Art in America, July 1992