Work on paper, 2004, Myeung-Ro Youn
Lithograph on paper, 53cm x 63cm
Provenance: Gana Art at Art Stage, Singapore.
Youn Myeung-Ro uses lines to create form, to depict undulating hills, flowing ground water, sheer cliffs in the depths of winter; a patchwork of coffee-coloured brushstrokes succeed in creating a mood permeated with Eastern aesthetics. He steeps his abundant expressive system in “line”, roams in a mountainous realm beyond appearances, and breathes with the universe to give visual expression to a kind of spiritual pursuit. Youn Myeung-Ro continues to follow with close interest the vitality of the “medium” and the persistent fluidity of colour and brushwork, allowing the tableau to develop a kind of living energy that pulsates with an eternal rhythm; emptiness and substantiality, the whole and the none, flat surfaces and a point of dispersal flood evenly into one work, one visual experience, creating form in a formless space, enlarging the borders of limitlessness within form, and enriching the visual experience of art.
Beholding Youn Myeung-Ro’s “mountainous forms” we sense a kind of still, deep natural flow of water emerging from the “short brushstrokes, connected by significance” that are his furrowed lines. Just as Cézanne continuously deconstructed the Monte Sainte-Victoire, Youn time and again surveys Mount Bukhansan just outside his window: clear rain from morning till night, scattering drops like strokes, his heart and brush are one, like the texture of white porcelain, driving forward the universal character and contemporary appearance of Eastern literati paintings.
In a change of direction from Western modernism to the East, Youn Myeung-Ro drifts in the sentiments and scenes of traditional literati landscape painting, yet also rebels against this fixed schema; this is the background to Youn’s art practice.
Excerpted from Traces of the Spirit on the Art of Youn Myeung-Ro, Fan Di’an, Director, National Art Museum of China (1).