He was drawing stick-like lines downward with jet-black paint on rough cloth. The scenes he rendered everyday were all full of black that feels somewhat eerie. "Why do you draw only black lines?" When I spoke to him, he replied "I did it with anger!"

In 1972, the Park Chung-hee regime established an absurd special constitution and created the National Council for Unification whose members elected a president. Not long ago, I attended the general meeting of the Korea Fine Arts Association held to elect its president. I didn't know its rules were revised, but the method of electing the president had changed : its members nominated some candidate and elected him as the president by clapping. Even if we were on site, we had no real way to vote. When I stayed for a while outside the meeting room in the corridor, I ran into Yun Hyong-keun coming up the stairs. In no time at all, we moved to a bar in Myeong-dong. He said not long ago he was taken to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in Namsan, Seoul. He was released from there after as many as 20 days. The whole story is as follows.

In those days, Yun was working for a girl's high school as an art teacher. I once worked for a middle school of the same foundation but I quit after a military coup on May 16, 1961. It was known that Yun was taken by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and forced to resign from the school where he had worked for 10 years due to some affair. That affair was that a middle school student who clearly had low grades was recorded to have high scores on an entrance examination for high school. Teachers decided to keep this matter secret when they were aware that the student was a daughter from the group in power that was backed up by the agency. In a faculty meeting the next day, however, Yun urged the principal to shed light on the truth. In the afternoon of next day, Yun went out to Myeong-dong but was taken to Namsan by the agency's agent. He got free because he was not especially guilty but he seemed to promise to quit the school.

From that day on, he came to have nothing to do. Just at that time he called on me. He was registered as a person on a blacklist by the police. No friends came to see him since it was during the Yushin regime that ruled with an iron fist. There was nothing to do but painting for him. Afterwards, we met almost every day for ten years. As he had been branded a rebellious person, nobody tried to associate with him. As they did not know what would happen if they got involved with him, no one dared to get next to him. When Kim Jeong-hui went into exile, nobody visited him. Kim painted his most celebrated ink painting, usually known as Sehando (歲寒圖) during his exile and gave it to his disciple Yi Sang-jeok in gratitude of his favor and friendship. This masterpiece could not have been produced had it not been for Yi Sang-jeok.

This is a departure point of Yun's painting. Yun had no reason to go to Namsan and his blackish paintings would not have been produced had it not been for the admission scandal. I saw that Yun's conscience and his inability to turn a blind eye to corruption was the source of his painting. Like Kim Jeong-hui, a celebrated artist or later Joseon period, was in exile in Jeju for nine years and perhaps one year in Hamgyeong Province, Yun was in a prison without bars for ten years. As the years they spent in exile or in hardship are similar, historically great men were left behind, one in the 19th century and the another in the 20th century.

Yun's solo show took place in Germany the following year. His works seemed well received there. After the exhibition, Yun called on me in my house one morning and offered me the exhibition catalog. However, he took it back in the afternoon. I didn't know why he took it back again even though he probably had many copies of the catalog. I had this question hanging over my head for about ten years. Something secret was probably put in this catalog. Sure enough, the fact that he was in the Seodaemun Prison in 1956 was printed there. I also found he had been involved in four big events that were all extremely dangerous to his life including the "Bodo League" massacre, his fight against the establishment of Seoul National University, and the girl's high school admission scandal. He was a figure who might be involved in an independence movement if he was older. I cannot understand why such facts were still covered up.

Thus, Yun's painting has to be seen in consideration of this background. His art cannot be viewed merely in terms of the pure formative arts. So, I have asserted that his art has to be seen to have an expressionist tendency. He intentionally eschewed any subtle pleasure deriving from modeling qualities. As a result, his painting became more potent. He was always on the side of the needy and the poor. To be on the side of the strong or seek any gains did not suit him. He gave unrelenting criticism to something wrong and unjust and referred to those always in the sun as little men. He was always awake and thirsted for righteousness as a rebel of the times.

In his painting something feminine, warmhearted, and gentle was hidden in upright dignity or something veracious, explicit, succinct, clean and cool. His painting appears as something incarnating the virtuous scholar's spirit of the Joseon Dynasty. Yun's painting looks exactly like the one who did it. His painting is great work created by a great man with a big idea. It brings about a tremendous resonance. His work has something spiritual, something spouting out from the deep inner world, and something like Goguryeo spirit while he was a native of Chungcheong Province.

His painting is like an ideograph laden with his life stories. It seems exhalant rather than painted. His inner world seems jam-packed with rugged mountains. How was it possible to portray them in a single scene? His scenes cannot help but be pared down. How can the white stream of water falling down radically be expressed in words? Yun's painting exists where no language exists. Something rational and emotional is manifested as new aspects of Yun's painting in search of their interface. His scenes are artless representations of his life. Another white is in white while innumerable shades of black are in black. His painting is also imbued with a sense of volume flowing as massively as the Han River. An artist and his or her painting resemble each other. Yun's painting takes after the artist himself. We are at time stunned by the similarity between Yun and his painting. His image is often discovered in his paintings. Yun's painting comes to resemble him more. And then, it enters the world of eternity after leaving him. This means his painting achieves independence from him. His painting has become part of history. The artist will be undying as a most veritable human character who lived in the turbulent era of the 20th century while his painting will last as a most trustworthy model of paintings in history.

His black abstract images have been spiced up by his spirit to resist against injustice. They have imprinted an undyingly poem on people's ardent hearts with a symbol of sublime spirit, holding the pain of our time in his paintings. 

“When the world gets sick, it saddens a poet's heart.” Constantin Gheorghiu, a writer best known for his novel, The 25th Hour, said this when he was in Seoul. Can the truth of painting and life be separable? When it comes to Yun's art, I call this question to mind. I had the opportunity to see a few of Yun's paintings featuring diagonally horizontal lines during the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement. Can art remain sound when the nation is in crisis? What country were you born in? When a country perishes, people rise.

After the Park Chung-hee regime collapsed and the Chun Doo-hwan rose to power, Yun freed from the fetter. It was his emancipation in ten years. He moved to Paris in 1980 but returned to Seoul after about two years. Since then his painting of black columns began involving light. His painting that was as ebony as black no longer appeared dark. How could darkness remain after going through every hardship? Great artists usually revealed some bright atmosphere in their latter years. So did Yun's paintings. He overcame darkness. His art has embodied the Korean beauty of brightness, holding relaxation as an old master.

Art is long, life is short. There is a long road ahead for art, which is part of the great magnetism art has. Yun has passed away, leaving the unfinished in an unknown space. Turbulent times have come to an end. I don't know how Yun endured so many long gloomy years. How many stories does his wife and painter Kim Youngsuk (Kim Whanki's daughter) have in her heart? His paintings are imbued with all these stories but they say nothing about them.

Those who have undergone the years of the bitter cold are able to see more clearly the true meaning of Yun's art.

Jong-tae Choi, 2018

* from the exhibition catalog of

 Yun Hyong-keun's solo exhibition

held at MMCA Seoul, 2018-19