Humanism that Pierces through Solitude and Modern Times 

                                                                 

Ryoo Seok Woo(Poet,Art company  Misool Si Dae Director)

Artist Yoo In Soo's theme had always been city and man. This seemingly commonplace yet fundamental theme had stayed with him for a long time.  

Why did he always insist on such form and style based on modernism? Could it be that he wanted to express the era he had experienced in the language of art since his status as an artist and his age is now at an influential stage?    

People who are concealed in desolate and lonely city, light over darkness, desperation rather than hope, and dismal tension rather than comforting relaxation are the things that I feel from his previous works that closely reflect our modern age.  

 

In his artwork, housings in the city seem like multi-purpose buildings and people who are in and out of them have different facial expressions and body language.  This scene is quite similar to monodrama of life.  

The buildings and the people who are in the scene are depicted unclearly in surreal manner with light touch of a sketch. But through this expression, he seems to be telling everything about human beings. He has expressed certain atmosphere well enough in a manner that his audience can easily understand.  

Yoo In Soo has expressed solitude, alienation, desperation, desire, emptiness of modern day people through facial expressions of those who are dreaming and those who have lost their dreams, gestures of passion and despair, and the crossroads of peacefulness and anxiety. His previous works have depicted negative, cynical and  pessimistic mindset rather than positive point of view. But this does not coincide with his personal character because he is a warm hearted intellectual who lives his daily life with integrity.      

I personally think that the reason why he scrutinized into these kinds of styles is because he has an objective and critical world view as a modernist. 

It is also a fact that the 50 years of his life reflect Korea's dark, barren and unjust times. This is why he expressed such times with landscape paintings in modernistic approach.

The pain and despair holding people's souls in captivity, struggles of mankind to avoid such pain by delving into desires, and the desperation and emptiness driven from this repetitive cycle are expressed with figures in despondent movements.  He could not have portrayed the dark times with positive outlook because he has a strong sense of ethical morality and also because he did not have enough wisdom that comes with age to embrace and contemplate on life at the time.      

His tendency of artwork started to change from 'Everyday Images' series of the 90's. Objective beings have changed into autobiographical or subjective beings. Through these changes, his paintings started to show waves of humanism. 

His recent pieces named with "C,"and numbers definitely show changes of landscape. Perhaps it's because of his wisdom that he has come to acquire by living fifty years in life and going on to sixty. His artworks now show gentle and elegant sense of humor that touches our hearts. 

  

At the present, he has achieved and acquired many things during the course of his life. After completing undergraduate and graduate program at Seoul National University College of Fine Arts, he studied painting at Ecole Nationale d'art and had twelve solo exhibitions in Seoul and Los Angeles.  He worked as the dean of College of Arts and Physical Education in Sangmyung University where he still teaches as a professor.  He also participated in Sao Paulo Biennale, Cagnes International Painting Festival, Korean Contemporary Art Festival, and national and private art galleries in Rome, Paris, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Taipei, Singapore, Manila, Sao Paulo and L.A.  In Korea, he was invited to National Museum of Contemporary Art and Seoul Museum of Art and participated numerous group exhibitions.  He was also a judge and a committee member for some of the most acclaimed art competitions including Korean National Art Competition.

He is Korea's prominent artist who has received every possible honorary recognition. I think his reputation as an artist has also given a generous heart which is now reflected in his paintings as heartwarming images. He still has cynical criticism but even his cynicism seems friendly enough to bring smile to our faces. 

His canvases are now warm and relaxed. Anonymous people in his paintings are now main subjects rather than objects. This signifies that stories about his life and those who are around him are conveyed in his work.        

It would not be fair to say his paintings have turned light and shallow. Things that only he can show such as the depth and weight of life haven't changed although some solid images have turned into soft melodies.  His recent pieces show that the artist has now entered the realm of transcendence by portraying that life is not just about darkness, loneliness, and pain.

Perhaps in 1980s, I saw in his painting the combination of taut and solid lines. The lines seem to take on both mineral and vegetable characteristics with their social, psychological, and cultural qualities. What's significant is that these lines are weaved so tightly that cut completely off myself from something. Despite the implications each line signifies, they look like a strong membrane. 

I felt stuffy. I understood such stuffiness was probably derived from my confrontation with the wall which caused solitude and severance with no exit. But I intended to interpret this situation positively. I am still shamed that such interpretation was so silly and arbitrary.

After then, in the 1990s I began to get more unique pleasure from Yoo's work. Since around this period, innumerable geometric beehive-shaped structures emerged out of the chink of minutely and solidly formed lines.

They seem quite interesting. The anonymous people taking weird postures like harlequins in his painting - I noticed indolence, longing, despair, anguish, wonder, and pleasure. I also witnessed something clambering, swaying, overturning, and falling. Although I remained embarrassed when I felt such lives overlap my own life, I enjoyed peeping at his studio with high - quality goggles. 

And then, I thought.

Yoo's main concerns were the megalopolis seething with desires and poor people with no freedom for deviation. And an ironic representation of a gruesome fish and a bird implies his attitude and way of seeing the world. But I was once again startled to see his recent works on display at the show. In a word while seeing his pieces, I feel warm and comfortable as if staying indoors with the fireplace burning.

Different from Yoo's previous paintings underlining acute lines, his recent works demonstrate thick and pliable lines in an unsophisticated, elastic quality. In his previous pieces the distance between the artist and objects he portray always remains regular. The artist never entered the world of such objects and in no way forced them to stay within him.

In his recent works, however, he communicates with such objects. They show no changes in their forms and gestures but exude a warm atmosphere, instead of coldness. That is mainly because the artist embraces them in a positive attitude, instead of negating them. 

Yoo's depiction of the scene in which people are laughing in accord with tigers and birds in the middle of a civilized urban area is made possible because he can admit the relationship between man and nature, beings and beings. The artist seems to attain a state of loving all beings, their attributes, and even their conflicts. 

On the occasion of this exhibition, I add my thanks to the artist Yoo for giving me a chance to lessen my almost fixed tendency favoring naming and classifying all. 

Pictorial Jokes by a Modernist 

by Lee Ihn-bum, Aesthetics 

As Presented in not a few one-person exhibition of 13 times and group shows throughout his entire career, Yoo In-soo's art world went through s wide rande of variations. The fact that we cannot overlook is that his art is particulaly characterized by a variety of heterogeneity as much as it underwent plenty of variations. Such heterogeneity, however, appears to be so various that it's in no way seen as the hallmark of artworks by just one artisr. 

What's all the more apparent is, on the one hand, the continuation of self-awareness of the limited condition of human existence and, on the other, is the maintenance of his pure artistic cravings for line and color as the components of his canvas. These two element exclude each other, asserting their own rights. It's interesting that the two are becoming the basis for his existence. In this respect, these two these two heterogeneous worlds can be said as the two pillars maintaing Yoo's art world. 

Yoo's pieces in a wide range spectrum apparently demonstrate that one of the fundamental tasks his art has so far taken is none other than to dissolve such antinomy, from which his possibilities and sufferings as an artist have been probably derived. His early serial works Urban Images and Nirvana embody modernist ethics but remain detached from his own existence. What the artist represents in the Daily images series, which began in the 1990s and has continued up to the present, is the reality of life but that is regrettably away from an artistic ideal he sought to attain as a modernist. 

In this respect, this exhibit is meaningful and worth of notice. As both a mid- career artist in the Korean art world and an individual who has grown mature in his life experience, the artist seem to be in a philosophical state. A myriad of small rooms comparted by the lines are not something to confine or restrict our existence any more. Rather, they are the grounds for amusements generously embracing the reality of life. Under this condition, men are able to enjoy such critical situation, going beyond their existential obsession. Accordingly, the world he portray seems quite different from the previous one seen from far away and confined to existence. In this world any modernist obsession with a formality or rigid ethical consciousness is not found any longer.

As a result, Yoo In-soo's dark, grave canvas turns bight. All the icons he depicts such as politicians surrounding the National Assembly building, prostitutes, and groups of people show various aspects of life. In addition, these figures are represe. sented more concretely and distinctively. That is probably derived from his empathy with all in the world and his humor and leisurely mind brought up by his affection and meditation. They are all perhaps given by his experience as an artist with time. 

If the artists insists on being a modernist, it can be said that he is in a word a modernist who can enjoy jokers.