Yang Soon-yeal’s small painting of a wilted sunflower appears more majestic than if it were in full blossom. The flower’s stem is painted with a calligraphic line that weaves around a halo of tiny inverted petals as it moves towards an energetic emptiness. It is truly magnificent. Yet I wonder if the artist was aware of this dynamic interval during the moment the sunflower first caught her attention. As a gift from nature, it appears to have taken on a symbolic meaning of its own. Through Yang’s hand and eye, the meaning of this simple flower has been transformed into an oblique floral incarnation, a testament of tranquility meandering through the cycle of life. It is a painting that projects the feeling of eternal necessity, a moment that evokes faith in life’s purpose.
I am taken by the idea that in Yang Soon-yeal’s paintings, there is a moment when the image appears without a formula or without a specific calculation. I am reflecting here to a densely painted pinkish landscape with an abstract upright figure or figuration from 2012-13. This figure is possible the sign of a Mother, often used in other paintings. The surface is brilliant with a certain density. While different from that of the sunflower, the second painting is not directly observed by the artist. Even so, the cycle of life feels present. Nothing more was needed beyond the walking figure in the glowing pinkish light. The painting has a character of its own.
In each of these paintings, a moment is described, a transformative moment that encapsulates the cycle of life. From an Eastern point of view – specifically a Buddhist point of view – the cycle of life functions as the eternity of nature. In the art of Yang Soon-yeal, this further becomes what she calls the “mother’s work of art,” which is basis of all that is living or beyond living. The cycle continues and enhances the beauty of art. “in light of the human race, it is splendid that you live for one-thousand years” – this being the life of hanji paper made from crushed mulberry leaves and the bark of the elm tree. It is said that the ink paintings on hanji -- if properly maintained – will exist for a millennium.
There are times when it becomes difficult to discern what an artist means or if it is necessary for an art to mean anything at all. As Yang Soon-yeal has suggested through her art and through her marvelously poetic writings, it is necessary to discovery the search that possesses oneself. “The inside me is not always ready for the outer me, following the path of learning, following the delicacies of art.” In recent years, this transference of meaning coming from the outside to the inside has become all the more profound. There is pain within lightness, and lightness within pain.
The source that resides in her paintings and within her deeply felt poetic thoughts emanates through the Mother, often spelled (in English) with a capital “M.” Given her ability to nurture and to watch over the living in the process of growing and evolving through various stages of life, the symbolic function of the Mother remains steadfast. While there is much to be said concerning the latent energies and sentimental feelings of the Mother in relation to her children and to the aura of peacefulness that surrounds her daily life within the presence of her garden, yet there is also a strong Neo-Confucian aspect, perhaps latent within the artist’s symbolic intention and, in many ways, in the practical vision of the Mother.
This version of Neo-Confucianism is not entirely indebted to the Song Dynasty in China. Rather it evolved directly in relation to the changes that accrued in Korea during late fourteen century at the outset of the Joseon Dynasty. At this time, another version of Neo-Confucianism replaced the pervasive Buddhism of the previous Goryeo Dynasty. The Korean version orchestrated by the leaders of the burgeoning Joseon Dynasty, stipulated a division between the role of wife/mother and the husband/father, whereby each performed separate tasks while working in a presumed complementary relationship to one another.
Here the role of the Mother became highly significant. Her primary tasks were to raise the children and to essentially to stay at home carrying for the internal needs of the household and the family. In contrast, the husband/father was responsible for raising income to support the family, which often included being outside the premises of the household, thus giving various liberties to the male superior not available to the wife/mother. To ensure this manner of living, Neo-Confucian documents made clear the role of the wife/mother would continue with the household after the children were grown and married, whereupon she would take the responsibility of caring not only for her own aged parents but also for those of her husband.
Given Yang Soon-yeal’s self-appointed role as an artist who endows the symbol of the Mother with a continuing grace and a heightened spiritual understanding, her emblematic signs of Motherhood are replete both in her prolific paintings and in her related doll-like objects that depict the wearing of the traditional hanbok or formal marriage dress that covers the female body in such a way that obscures pregnancy. An extraordinary tactile beauty possesses many of the paintings. I refer specifically to works from a series titled, Dream & Love – Mother. One of these (2012) includes the silhouette of a blue stork positioned behind the female figure on a painterly red field, while another (2013) represents a greenish white seascape where a small pink emblem of the Mother is placed as a sunset appears on the horizon. Yang has also produced a significant number of hand-scroll drawings that function as poetic thoughts with pronounced images that carry her intention forward in adoration of the Mother.
Here it is important to make a clear distinction as to what is meant by the Confucian role of the wife/mother and the more spiritual notion of Mother as Yang speaks of her poetry and as visually represents these feelings in her highly imaginative and persuasive world of art, I would say, most directly found in her illuminated colorful paintings. There is little doubt that in recent years this has become the artist’s primary concern and her driving motivation, for which she has been clearly inspired, possibly as a kind of mysticism.
However, there is more than a single way of understanding this difference --- again, founded on Ms. Yang’s artistic passion – that concerns a spiritual transformation as she reflects upon her current age (over 50 years) in reference to heartfelt memories she possesses of and from her Mother. In this context, the Mother becomes the spiritual incarnation of art, which is the fundamental basis of how she as an artist understands her role, partially going back to the shamanist tradition that returns earlier than 5000 B.C.E. when it came from the north and gradually moved into the lower part of the Korean peninsula. For the artist, Yang Soon-yeal, this was the basis of a new direction in art, a direction that she believes has continued into the present. In her case, the present becomes the spark of enlightenment that generates the possibilities for going beyond all expectations of what and how this spiritual incarnation of art might be possible for human beings to create and sustain on planet Earth. To understand the Mother in Yang’s art is to comprehend the full sensory apparatus that allows us to liberate ourselves from the oppressions we have more often than not generated for ourselves.
The poetic verse written by Yang Soon-yeal can be illuminating as an accompaniment to her paintings, drawings, and sculptural installations. From a transcript titled “Hooray!” I gleaned the following passage:
So plan and common, as well as with a very profound sense of
human harmony, all the world’s mothers often make sense.
It is like fermented water from washed rice
In your heart is your tumbling doll, in my heart is my tumbling
doll!
The logic, of course, may escape the reader, but the potency of the verse continues to resonate as an intense, highly articulate reality. Yang’s poetry, when read in relation to a large-scale work like Homo Sapiens (2006-2015), may provide a stimulating access to how the artist thinks both in terms of material and spiritual meditation. In this major installation, Yang has assembled hundreds of cast stainless steel forms, which focus on abstract interpretations of the human figure. Over time, the work transformed into the form of an installation – a magnum opus – that developed over a nine year duration as an homage to human beings in which hundreds of stainless steel figurative forms, each of which was cast and placed individually atop inverted goblets with a wadded cloth napkin placed inside the glass.
The spectacle proved daunting as it should have been and will most likely continue to be. The important point is less quantitative than qualitative to the extent that the impact of seeing these individualized figurative forms presented in this format is both a surprise encounter and an experience worth remembering. This is to further suggest that Yang Soon-yeal’s remarkable, if not heroic artistic career continues to reinvent itself. In the process of reinventing itself, it continues to assert its importance not only as a representation of the Mother but also as an intrinsic human endeavor to remind us that every generation maintains a responsibility to keep astride of what is happening in their life-time and to always hold on to what is true.
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Robert C. Morgan is an artist, poet, curator, critic, lecturer and writer. He teaches at Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts in New York. He was inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Art in Salzburg (2011) and is the author of hundreds of essays and many books dealing with art and artists in various part of the globe and is translated into twenty languages
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