Umber 1🥹🥹
🐨: Yun – why he's so special? Everyone wants me to explain, but I can't. Because I love him so much. I even made a album cover of my own with his painting, and I think by his paintings, by his lives, by his personality, how he lived as an artist, as a father, as a human, he's like a teacher.
🐨: One of my friend really loved, admired his art and always told me like, “You should see his exhibition.” He had his big retrospective in the Korean MMCA, which is like Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. And I missed it because I didn't know his existence that very well at that time.
🐨: But I heard they're having a tour in Venice Biennale for like a satellite exhibition. So I literally flew to Venice just to see the exhibition, not the Biennale. They held this exhibition in a old atelier of an Italian artist. It was called Palazzo Fortuny. It was summer in 2019. And I was literally shocked because the whole building, it looks like it was built to show his paintings. When I just first got into it, a young girl was getting out to the exit, crying. So I was like, "Why is she crying?" And then once I got into it, I just understood it. I didn't cry, but it was a sublime experience. That was the point I started to really admire the Korean artists.
🐨: And when I look at the Korean modernists, right after the Korean War period, I just can't imagine the times, and I feel really ashamed of myself. I don't worry about like, the tomorrow just to get by. We were one of the poorest country, and we been through, like, the domination from Japan and the colonization. And after that, then we had to get through the Korean War, and we were divided by two, like many people know. Yun, he been through all those things. He didn't express his anger to the outside, you know, the society or his family. He just did it on the canvas, beautifully. I could see the rage, but really rage and grace at the same time in his paintings.
🐨: Especially in his early paintings, he did it like a lot of times: brushed it again and again because he was so angry and sad. I think he didn't know how to resolve it. Actually, when you get to know it, then there, you can see a lot of stories, by each strokes. It looks like it's crying sometimes. ‘Beonjim,’ the pourings. It looks like a Western painting, but it also looks like a calligraphy. It's an abstract, but you could see like a mountain or like a tombstone. It feels very universal and personal at the same time to me.
#RMxSFMOMA