At the exhibition's end, visitors come face to face with its two largest works. One is red, the other blue. In "Mountain-Red" and "Mountain-Blue," both painted in 1994, triangles resembling mountains rise beneath grids that cover the canvas. These are the largest works left by Yoo Young-kuk (1916–2002), "the pioneer of Korean abstract art." They embody the universal abstract landscape pursued by a painter who spent his life depicting mountains. He was 78 at the time, with a pacemaker fitted to his heart.
"Yoo Young-kuk: The Mountain Is Within Me," organized by the Seoul Museum of Art as a retrospective marking the 110th anniversary of the artist's birth, is on track to reach a cumulative 200,000 visitors this week amid its relentless popularity. According to the museum, a total of 192,670 people viewed the exhibition over 61 open days from its opening on May 19 through the 26th. The daily average of 3,159 visitors surpassed the 3,095 daily average of the "Edward Hopper" exhibition held at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2023. At this pace, the show is expected to comfortably exceed the 250,000 visitors of the 2016 "Lee Jung-seob" exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Deoksugung branch, the record for a Korean artist's solo museum exhibition. The exhibition runs through October 25.
This exhibition is the largest ever, presenting a total of 178 works including 115 oil paintings, along with reliefs, photographs, drawings and archival materials. As many as 15 previously unseen oil paintings, including seascapes, are on display. It is also the first exhibition in the museum's newly established "Korean Modern Masters" series.
The exhibition begins in 1964. The artist held his first solo show at age 48, 30 years into his career as a painter. At a time when even obtaining canvas was difficult, he displayed 15 oil paintings larger than 100 ho, nine of which are shown again in this exhibition. During that period, when Kim Whanki left for New York and Han Mook and Moon Shin left for Paris, Yoo Young-kuk declared that he would "put an end to group activities and live as a full-time artist."
Yoo Young-kuk, who never let his pride as a Korean falter, pursued "freedom" and enrolled in the oil painting department of Japan's Bunka Gakuin in 1935. Lee Jung-seob and Kim Whanki were at his side. Considering that the concept of abstract art was born in Europe in the 1920s, Yoo was among the fastest painters to grasp the abstract language. He cut and pasted plywood and corrugated cardboard, creating fully abstract reliefs even stripped of color, and won an award at the 1938 Free Artists' Association exhibition. While most Korean painters reached abstraction from figuration by way of semi-abstraction, Yoo was abstract from the start. Asked why abstraction, the painter answered, "I like that it says nothing."
In 1943, as the shadow of the Pacific War loomed, he returned home and took up a fishing net instead of a brush. He sailed his father's boat in Uljin and opened a brewery. The period he himself called his "lost decade" ended in 1955, when he closed his business and moved to Seoul. From then on, he painted to his heart's content. The first person to buy a painting by the artist, who had said "my paintings will not sell in my lifetime," was Lee Byung-chull, the founding chairman of Samsung Group. In 1975, having seen Yoo's work through the arrangement of Choi Sun-u, former director of the National Museum of Korea, Chairman Lee is said to have praised it, saying, "Even abstract painting is fine when it's this good." That is why many of Yoo Young-kuk's works are included in the list of donations from the "Lee Kun-hee Collection."
Yoo Young-kuk spent his life painting the mountains of his hometown, Uljin. Uljin is a place where the boundless sea meets layer upon layer of mountains. The painter said during his lifetime that "a mountain has everything in it," and that "the triangle of the peak, the curve of the ridge, the planes of near and far, and diverse colors are all within it." No two of the mountains in the exhibition, which realize those words, are the same. He moves across colors from mountains hardened into triangles to mountains softened by footpaths and trees.
After the pacemaker was fitted in 1977, the painter continued to paint through eight surgeries and dozens of hospital admissions and discharges. To his son, who told him to rest, he shouted, "What more could a painter want than to die while painting?"
The world belatedly recognized the painter who steadfastly remained in Korea. In 2023, his first overseas solo show opened at Pace Gallery in New York, followed the next year by his first solo exhibition in Europe through a special exhibition at the Venice Biennale. RM (real name Kim Nam-joon) of BTS, famous as an art lover, gladly lent his own collected work "Work (1968)" and even visited the exhibition in person.
His final brushstroke stopped in 1999. Red triangles rise layer upon layer, and at the top a near-transparent white triangle ascends toward the sky. The exhibition's title comes from words he left in 1977: "The mountain is not before me but within me."
Choi Eun-ju, director of the Seoul Museum of Art, said, "In the age of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, audiences are paradoxically resonating with an exhibition that speaks about the essence of humanity and art," adding, "In the original abstraction, where the forms of mountains, rivers and seas that any Korean would recognize converge into Yoo Young-kuk's own lines, colors and planes, people will feel both pride and awe at once." Admission is free.
