Yoo Youngkuk: Stand on the Golden Mean
PKM Gallery, Seoul
21 August–10 October 2024
Entering PKM Gallery’s “Yoo Youngkuk: Stand on the Golden Mean,” one is immediately confronted with the dialectical tension between modernist abstraction and the specificity of Korean landscape. Yoo’s work, spanning four decades, presents a complex interplay between Western formalism and an indigenous aesthetic sensibility.
The exhibition’s curation is chronological and risks a teleological reading of Yoo’s practice. However, Yoo himself wrestled with the idea of representation in the face of rapid modernization and geopolitical upheaval. How does one represent such rapidly shifting sands upon which no foundation can stand?
The inclusion of previously unseen works from the artist’s estate provides a crucial intervention in the established narrative of Yoo’s oeuvre. These pieces, particularly from the 1970s, demonstrate a heightened tension between abstraction and referentiality, challenging simplistic readings of Yoo’s practice as a linear progression towards pure form.
Of particular interest is Yoo’s treatment of color. He favors vibrant reds and deep blues that simultaneously evokes the Korean landscape and engages with the international language of modernist abstraction. This bivalence points to the broader question of how non-Western artists navigate the globalized discourse of modernism in terms of their own local traditions and experiences.
The exhibition’s title, “Stand on the Golden Mean,” appears to position Yoo’s work as a harmonious resolution of opposing forces. However, this framing risks obscuring the productive contradictions and unresolved tensions that animate his practice. A more critical reading might consider how Yoo’s work embodies the very impossibility of such a “golden mean” in the context of Korea’s rapid modernization and complex cultural negotiations.
Ultimately, “Stand on the Golden Mean” offers a necessary, if at times uncritical, reassessment of Yoo Youngkuk’s contribution to Korean modernism. While the exhibition succeeds in highlighting the artist’s unique synthesis of abstract form and landscape sensibility, it leaves room for further interrogation of the socio-political contexts that shaped his practice. As such, it leaves viewers of Yoon’s art a sense of dislocation, or at least a suspicion that the art’s context has been de-boned and forgotten in the landfills of Korea’s cultural past.
