SeMA opens new retrospective on Yoo Young-kuk, modern master of the 'mountain within'

“The mountain is not in front of me, it is inside me.”

Korean abstract artist Yoo Young-kuk said this in 1977, the year he was first fitted with a pacemaker for a heart condition. He went on to have seven more surgeries and many more hospital stays before he died in 2002, and he kept painting through all of them — alone, without assistants, on a nine-to-six studio schedule.

Yoo's statement inspired the title of his retrospective "A Mountain Within Me," which opens on Tuesday at the Seoul Museum of Art’s (SeMA) Seosomun main branch. It is the largest show on Yoo ever mounted — 178 works including 115 oil paintings — and it marks the 110th anniversary of the artist’s birth.  

A new collection of 15 canvases, drawn from the artist’s family’s private holdings, are being shown publicly for the first time. The exhibition is also the first in SeMA's new “Korean Modern Masters” series, which museum director Choi Eun-ju has paired with the museum’s running line of imported blockbusters including David Hockney and Edward Hopper as the domestic side of the same program.

The new retrospective exhibition defies chronology. Curator Yeo Kyung-hwan, who organized the exhibition, explained that it begins in 1964 — the year Yoo, then 49, held his first solo exhibition, announced he would no longer take part in group shows, and committed himself to working alone.  

The show then runs the visitor backward in time, into the artist’s Tokyo years and the cubism-futurism-constructivism intake of 1930s Japan, then to the lost decade after Korea’s liberation during which Yoo ran a fishing boat and brewery to feed his family, before turning forward again through the artist's geometric abstractions of the 60s and 70s.

“We thought hard about who to open this series with,” Yeo said during a press conference at SeMA on Monday. “We came to the conclusion that the only artist who could open it was Yoo. The contemporaneity he carries — the way the modern and the contemporary sit on top of each other in him — is the reason we are doing this at all.”

The argument the exhibition makes is that the late paintings, the ones from after 1980, are where Yoo becomes most contemporary, not least. This phase is “mind-image abstraction,” where the mountain that had been Yoo’s subject for 40 years stops being something he looks at and becomes something he is. The geometry loosens, the color quiets, and the rooms are arranged so the viewer is not so much looking at a mountain as walking down one.

Yoo Jin, president of the Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation and Yoo Young-kuk’s eldest son, pushed the title line further.  

“I read it more personally, that truth is not outside but inside, so reflect and find it,” he said.  

Yoo Jin compared his father’s position to French artist Eugene Delacroix, who, he argued, after a lifetime of wrestling with social and moral questions, located the source of creation in his own interior.  

“Self-reflection will matter more in the artificial intelligence age, not less, precisely because there is so much information now that it has become difficult to tell what is true,” he said.

“In a moment when technology is shaking the very concept of creation, Yoo’s work asks again what the intrinsic value of human intuition and the act of painting is,” Choi also said.

The exhibition is built to hold that question of creation rather than answer it. Yoo did not sell his first painting until 1975, at 59, and there is something in the way the rooms are sequenced — the geometry of the 70s pressing into the looser late work — that makes the long stretch of unsold years feel like the actual subject.

“A Mountain Within Me” runs through Oct. 25 at SeMA’s Seosomun main branch in Jung District, central Seoul. Admission is free, with audio exhibition guides in English available.  

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]