In a special exhibition at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, three paintings from 1993 by the late South Korean artist Yun Hyong-keun hang near Donald Judd’s untitled works in plywood from 1978. Fifteen years and nearly seven thousand miles separate the works’ respective origins, yet they are conversant. Think of the pairing as a posthumous exchange by the two artists who first met in 1991 when Judd was invited to exhibit and lecture at the Inkong Gallery in Seoul.

 

Korea was not new to Judd. He was stationed in the country on the eve of the Korean War as part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. From 1946 to 1947, the eighteen-year-old Judd worked as a construction foreman at a U.S. air base in Gimpo, near Seoul, in a country that had just emerged from thirty-five years of brutal Japanese occupation only to be divided in half, under the trusteeship of the Soviet Union and China in the north and the United Kingdom and the United States in the south. Judd recalled his time in Korea, a country poised as a battleground in the global Cold War politics, as “interesting and pleasant.”[i] During this time, he learned the basics of industrial construction and materials, which would later come to define his practice as a leading figure in Minimalism.

 

When Judd returned to the United States, in 1947, after being honorably discharged, Yun was enrolled in Seoul National University to study art. There, Yun participated in a student protest movement against the U.S.-led consolidation of universities in South Korea, which resulted in his expulsion as well as being permanently marked as a political dissident. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the U.S.-backed South Korean president Rhee Syngman rounded up hundreds of thousands of people, including the young artist, under the pretext of anticommunism. During what came to be known as the Bodo League Massacre, the largest state-led execution of civilians in Korean history, an estimated sixty thousand to two hundred thousand people perished. Yun was miraculously spared this fate by narrowly escaping a firing squad. Considering his life to be on borrowed time ever since, Yun continued his pursuit of art despite the political turbulence that followed in the Korean peninsula. 

 

Judd’s and Yun’s disparate experiences of Korea’s pivotal war years would echo throughout their respective careers as they developed their own ideas about art. For Judd, overseeing the construction of prefabricated buildings provided a foundational training for not only working with industrial materials but a spatial practice he would later learn to articulate in his frequent writing on art and architecture. Although it is difficult to say how his time in Korea shaped his political and cultural outlook on the world, Judd’s awareness of Korean history and culture traces back to this year abroad, and his rejection of American imperialism was made abundantly clear in texts such as “Imperialism, Nationalism, and Regionalism,” (1975) and “Art and Internationalism” (1992). Yet, even as he bristled at “being accused of being an agent of the United States government,” he was part of the generation of white Americans who benefited from the economic imperialism of his country.[ii] 

 

U.S. imperialism had a far more direct impact on Yun’s life. His political conviction in a war-torn country helmed by a series of U.S.-backed, authoritarian governments meant that he was unable to continue his education at Seoul National University, forcing him to transfer to Hongik University where he studied under his future father-in-law and artist Kim Whanki. Troubles followed him into the 1970s when he was arrested for the fourth time on a flimsy charge and incarcerated in 1973, a year after the former military leader then South Korean president Park Chung-hee passed the autocratic Yushin Constitution. The constitution gave Park sweeping powers and lifted term limits to his presidency while severely limiting South Korean citizens’ rights and freedom of expression. After his release, the forty-five-year-old Yun found himself abandoning earlier formal experiments with bright colors and repetitive gestures. In an oppressive and undemocratic society, Yun decidedly pursued a new mode of working and developed his signature style. He applied layers of thin umber and blue paint that seeped into the unprimed canvas to create deep, radiant black columns. Drawing comparisons to both Eastern calligraphy and Mark Rothko’s transcendent paintings, Yun’s mature style was the result of a decades-long search for his own voice in a rapidly modernizing country that was actively and violently suppressing its people’s creative expressions. 

 

Unlike Judd, who initially trained as a painter but turned his attention fully to three-dimensional works by 1963, Yun remained committed to oil on canvas throughout his life. While Judd sought to achieve both precision and simplicity of form through working with fabricators of various industrial materials, Yun’s experiments delved into better understanding the nature of paint and canvas and the composition of his large columnal strokes. Given the heavy censorship of the Korean media under President Park, Yun did not have the kind of publication outlet that Judd had as a writer and thus turned to his journal to record his thoughts. In a 1977 entry, Yun denominated his paintings cheonjimun (천지문), which roughly translates to “a gateway between heaven and earth.” He explained that the blue represented the sky (천), the umber the earth (지), and the columns demarcated a gateway (문). With each repeated stroke defining the edges of a portal, Yun was ultimately and inversely rendering the space in the middle, conjuring not only what lies between the earth and the sky but what may exist between the spiritual and material worlds.

 

Although Yun’s painterly language of emptiness rhymes with Judd’s delineation of volume in space, the contexts in which these artists sought to express their ideas about symmetry, color, light, and other artistic concerns could not have been any more different within the knotted political histories of the United States and South Korea. That Judd’s and Yun’s works hang in the same place and time - Marfa, Texas, 2022 - begs a worthwhile question of the artists’ relationship in addition to the formal affinity, especially given that Judd’s vision of the Chinati Foundation was to preserve the works by him and his artistic interlocutors in what he considered to be their most appropriate settings. 

 

Judd’s reputation preceded the two artists’ meeting in Seoul, in 1991. Considering that Yun’s father-in-law Kim resided in New York from 1963 until his death in 1974, it was likely that Kim, and thereby his protégé and son-in-law Yun, were aware of Judd’s rising prominence in the 1970s as well as the emergence of a new type of art in the United States, which Judd described as “specific objects” in the 1964 essay of the same name. Judd may have written that “it’s one of the many art historical clichés that the place is responsible for common characteristics,” but it is difficult to imagine the kind of artistic experiments that Judd describes in “Specific Objects” taking root in South Korea in the 1960s, under the material poverty of the country’s then largely failing agricultural economy, and in the 1970s through the 1980s, under military government censorship.[iii] Yun and many fellow abstract painters of his generation, who were born during the Japanese colonial era, survived the Korean War, and matured into their practice during Park’s regime, retroactively came to be identified with Dansaekhwa, meaning monochrome paintings. Just as many artists, including Judd, eschewed the label of Minimalism, Dansaekhwa as a term belies the range of artistic practices among the artists who have become associated with this loose grouping. Nonetheless, the term became shorthand for the early avant-garde painters from South Korea as they increasingly became the subject of frequent international surveys, market speculation, and scholarly research. 

 

South Korea only recently began to practice democracy in more than nominal ways with the political reform of the late 1980s under President Roh Tae-woo, the last in a string of military leaders. The 1988 Seoul Olympic Games were heralded as a breakthrough when South Korea invited the world to showcase the country’s phenomenal economic growth, dubbed the Miracle on the Han River, which continues to be celebrated without regard to the human rights abuses of the past years. With the 1992 election of Kim Young-sam, the first civilian president since the 1960s, there was both cultural and economic optimism as well as an increased international exchange. It was at this critical historic juncture that Dansaekwa artists began actively exhibiting abroad. Yun, in particular, participated in international surveys such as the 1992 group exhibition Working with Nature: Traditional Thought in Contemporary Art from Korea at Tate Liverpool and the 1995 Venice Biennale. It was also in the early 1990s that Judd visited South Korea for the second time. In “Art and Internationalism,” Judd reflects on Korea’s sweeping development as “partly good” but also “destructive,” and laments the increasing homogenization of cities and the flattening of distinct cultures around the world.[iv] For artists whose national and cultural identity had been actively suppressed for as long as they had been alive, however, internationalism offered opportunities to assert their artistic voices and engage with other practitioners outside of the former isolationist country.

 

By the early 1990s, Yun was an established artist with influence and renown in his country. On behalf of his friend and Inkong Gallery owner Hwang Hyon-wook, who wished to exhibit Judd’s work, Yun contacted Gallery Yamaguchi in Osaka where Judd had previously exhibited. Through an introduction from Gallery Yamaguchi to the U.S. artist, Hwang facilitated Judd’s visit and organized his first exhibition and lecture in Korea in 1991. In a review titled “Who’s Afraid of a Box?,” the art historian Kang Tae-hee noted that the exhibition featured a limited number of Judd’s recent works from 1989 to 1991 and that the lecture was attended by those who wanted to hear Judd theorize about Minimalism, only to be disappointed by his primary discussion of the Chinati Foundation.[v] Kang nonetheless described the exhibition as being a helpful glimpse into his practice and used the publication opportunity to chart the art-historical context for Judd’s practice and expound on Minimalism. Under the guise of a review, the text was a demonstration of an awareness of Western art practices that were increasingly becoming part of Korean artists’ common parlance. Unlike in the past decades when studying and living abroad was the privilege of a wealthy few, more artists began traveling internationally to participate in artistic conversations outside of their immediate circles.

 

A few snapshots of the smiling Judd and Yun document their encounter in Seoul. What followed - Yun’s first solo exhibition in New York at Judd’s 101 Spring Street location in 1993 - indicates their mutual admiration. Yun concurrently presented his works at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, which traveled for another presentation at the Chinati Foundation, at the conclusion of which, Yun gifted the foundation with the three paintings that are currently on view. Judd was diagnosed with cancer in 1993 and died the following year when their friendship was only just beginning, leaving Yun to work through their affinities and differences on his own. While both artists turned away from figuration and representation to explore abstraction, Judd’s hard-edged geometry and mechanical precision were contrasted by Yun’s penchant for the fluid application of thinned paint. They were nonetheless united in their willingness to push inherited materials and forms to explore color and light as well as the relationship of art to its place in the world. 

 

Now that both artists have passed away, with their works left to index experiments and encounters of the past, what conversations are possible in the spaces between them? The place of formalism and abstraction in the current art discourse? Legacies of the Cold War and the hot war in Korea that remain unresolved to this day? The contemporary art market’s desire and an increased Western appetite for other modernisms, which are not unrelated to global politics? Nature as inspiration for art in a time of planetary crisis? On one level, the pairing of Judd’s and Yun’s works narrates a story of two individuals from different backgrounds intersecting and diverging, and how their artistic affinities manifest and become legible. On another level, it’s a story of economic and political forces greater than each of them, and how the messiness of world politics and economy influences artistic conversations. In the decommissioned army barracks that now house modern art by Judd and his friends under the auspice of the Chinati Foundation, Yun’s paintings invite an attentive look at not only the space of his canvas, but the space alluded to in cheonjimun (천지문) : the sky from where planes dropped bombs and the earth on which tanks treaded in the turmoil of a global power play.

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[i] “Local History: 1946 Western Union Telegram,” Judd Foundation,

https://juddfoundation.org/research/local-history/local-history-1946-western-union-telegram/.

[ii] Donald Judd, “Imperialism, Nationalism, and Regionalism,” 1975,

Judd Foundation.

[iii] Judd, “Imperialism, Nationalism, and Regionalism.”

[iv] Judd wrote, “Everything, everywhere, the normal appearance in 1947 [in South Korea], almost the whole of the Korean tradition and society, is now behind glass in the folk museum in Seoul and isolated in the folk villages, of course important and beautiful. This is a complete reversal in forty-five years, like the joke about the animals being outside the cages looking at the people inside. This is very fast and of course while partly good is very destructive, as can be seen by looking around, in Korea or anywhere.” See Judd, “Art and Internationalism,” 1992, Judd Foundation.

[v] Kang Tae-hee, “Who’s Afraid of a Box?,” Monthly Art (June 1991).