A painting stands up, and that's it.

 

An apparition.

 

A presence.

 

Not drips. Not traces. A mark. A kind of irreducible being-there. Something almost shy and silent, both immobile and active.

 

A form of energy that stays withdrawn, always remaining close to the source that gives it life.

 

Truth implementing itself, as Heidegger would say.

 

This is the painting of Hyong-keun Yun. He is an artist without a shadow, whom I've always felt uneasy ascribing to any given lineage, school, or History, or even to the field of Korean or international contemporary art, since he appears to me as something almost self-created, comparable only to himself.

 

Of course, this painter wasn't born from nothing. First, he started painting in oils, at a time when oil painting still uncommon in this part of Asia, where tradition and habit still favored ink and paper. Then, in the 1950s, he painted portraits of Stalin and Kim II Sung, which isn't exactly very popular today.

 

He was born in 1928 in a family of farmers cultivating tobacco at the heart of a Southern mountain region. He was young in a troubled time, a teenager in an atrocious period, an artist at a turning point of history where one had to be part of a Modernity which Asian artists did not understand very well and mostly only seemed to imitate, while Europe and America paid little attention to what was going in Asia in general and in Korea in particular.

 

One had to enter the resistance against the neighboring island: the country, not only invaded, not only colonized, had been devastated, deprived of its very self, its very core. The great masters of ceramics, these "living treasures", had been deported, together with everything that gave Korea its identity.

 

Later the Japanese force was replaced by the "American friend", against whom one also had to fight, since it was invasive and threatening to the point of attempting to close the National Universities and to replace the traditional Korean university system with an American one.

 

Vehemently, Hyong-keun Yun fought against this second form of colonization backed by the right and the military. Since the only resistance came from the left, he sided with the left, with its most extreme fringes. These ideas seemed right to him. Not so much "political" as simply "human".

 

In any case, that's what he says today.

 

He had told me about the same thing when I came to Seoul for the first time in 1988, to see the sculpture garden erected on the occasion of the Olympic Games, and visited him at home. I've kept notes from the four interviews we had. Words vary a little with interlocutors, but the same questions remain, the same answers also.

 

In 1995, when Christian Boltanski and I had the project of publishing the twenty or more interviews we had recorded since 1975, we were amused by the repetitive character of the discussions, by the few discrepancies which make all the flavor - sometimes the very value - of this kind of conversation with the few artists whose evolution one follows in the long term. The project never came through, but I listened to the tapes again. Whether Boltanski only swears by Richter or Gilbert and George, whether he sees the artist as a clown or a priest, every question, every answer, hinges on two or three essential points. It's the same with Hyong-keun Yun. It is always about the same things, the reasons for repetition or what appears repetitive. About calligraphy, silence, spiritual research, his situation considered from the Western and the Eastern point of view. Most importantly, about a central experience which hit him like lightening on June 27, 1950. Its basis is moral, and carries such an urgency, something not exactly intractable, but rather so huge, such so totally human, that it becomes obvious. It is about being upright rather than stiff. Here are the first things he said to me: "Painting is transmitting the spirit” or "Art should be serene", "Beauty comes from the inside". But also "We are in the process of destroying the world through lack of morals". One of the last statements: "One must have awful experiences".

 

On this chapter Hyong-keun Yun didn't exactly miss out. One June 27, 1950 - he was twenty-two years old - he was lined up (in the fourteenth place) with forty other students from the same university to be executed. Most of them died. Five survived. Hyong-keun Yun took advantage of a huge crush caused by some villagers from Chun-An and the ensuing confusion to run away. The next morning his hair had turned completely white.

 

After this, his three stints in prison, his constant escapes, and the bombing of the train station next to his house that lasted from forty minutes and almost killed him a second time, almost seem like nothing.

 

Dostoyevsky was not the same writer before and after being sentenced to death and the parody of an execution that followed, when the pardon of the Tsar only arrived as the soldiers had armed their weapons and were ready to fire. Hyong-keun Yun would never be the same again after June 27, 1950.

 

Can one call it an "experience", albeit "central", or talk, borrowing a phrase from Michaux, about "knowledge from the abyss"? This is the realm of the indescribable, or better, of the unspeakable. Absolute horror. Who can share such a cataclysm? Who can understand, or simply imagine?

 

What solitude!

 

Unless you pass beyond horror, step by step, slowly, and spend the remainder of your days affirming you're alive. Claiming to be "a man standing up”. Painting a vertical painting. Telling of this most precious belonging which is life. It seems obvious.

 

And to say it again, without repeating yourself.

 

For this you'll need to totally free the painting from anecdote and formalism, going straight to the core, the essential. Concentration.

 

Concentration while remaining in the open.

 

There has been talk of minimalism because Hyong-keun Yun had been noticed by Judd, because this extremely dense work relies on a limited vocabulary, and because no one really knows where his painting fits in. The critic's inability to account for certain works or artistic practices ought not to lead to rigid approximations that seek knowledge in simplistic, vaguely formal connections.

 

One should listen to Hyong-keun Yun when he says that painting is a world before speech. Writing we should strive to find, in the realm of poetry, something attuned to this world. See what Artaud did for Van Gogh, this tremendous plunge into the heart of the work and this shaken, abyssal and nervous prose that advances together with the thundering of the painting.

 

Hyong-keun Yun's paintings arrive after the storm. Death and transfiguration?

 

Yes.

 

Concretely, it's painting made at floor level, horizontally, as a calligraphic stroke, after concentration. Color is reduced to dark blues and browns, almost black on the unbleached canvas.

 

He says: "Black contains every color", and that's it. Beauty, for Hyong-keun Yun, is interior.

 

Concentrated, intense.

 

He works on his paintings like you write a diary, every single day, putting his very self into it. Into the canvas, into the body of oil and pigment, he inscribes both the terrible past that haunts him, that makes him say "I never was a youth" and the present, always different, which flows into "a painting that stands up". Some see a man there, others a tree, erect, dying, going back to the earth, becoming the earth and being born again.

 

It is a Buddhist notion, but also the Nietzschean idea of the "eternal return" From Nietzsche, Hyong-keun Yun appears to have retained quite a few things.

Remember the famous "Write with your blood", which also seems to perfectly make his point. Unfortunately, an American critic once understood the matter a little too literally and claimed that she had seen traces of coagulated blood in the brown of the paintings. Since then, Hyong-keun Yun is a little weary of this kind of statement.

 

It's understandable.

 

"Painting alone doesn't really matter." "It only exists in a relation," he says. For him ("It's the central idea", he once told me) he who makes something beautiful also has to be beautiful, in one way or another. There needs to be a connection.

 

"The artist” he says "must add the energy of the sun to that of intelligence”.

 

Such is Hyong-keun Yun.

 

He refuses what in the West is the province of reason or analysis. He is dazzled by the immutable and digs into it to his heart's content.

 

To the nerves.

 

To the source.

 

To the origin.

 

To the point where painting finally moves.