In her early years as an artist, Yang Soonyeal, who has a natural talent for representation, painted landscapes. She was living in Andong at the time, the capital city of North Gyeonsang Province, a center for traditional culture, known for its folk art in a region that was also celebrated for its natural splendors. Inspired by her location, she became a plein air painter like the French Impressionists—although not stylistically similar to them—working outdoors to capture subjects that caught her eye and were constantly changing, altered by the wandering of the light, the turnings of the seasons. The images from that period, around 1988 to 1998, were characterized by an extreme sensitivity to line, rhythm, and a lyrical delicacy of color, all traits that appears in her work throughout its development. Her focus on time and its ineluctable passage, the cycles of nature, the cycles of life, defined by their inevitable stages of bloom and decay to bloom again would become her signature theme, informing and underscoring all her work despite the changes in subject and style over the years.
Moving to the larger metropolis of Daegu in 1997, she shifted from landscape to focus on folk art and calligraphy. While that might seem an odd pairing, it was because she wanted to expand her skills, she explained. Folk art was less refined, its colors more vivid, immediate, its stylizations appealingly naïf, and more immediately comprehended, comparable to the visceral impact of many self-taught artists. Calligraphy, on the other hand, was more sophisticated, although in its own way, equally direct. Studying it taught her how to wield the brush. By merging the two, it led her to a style that was less representational, more schematized and eventually it took her to an abstraction that included the geometric and the richly, dazzlingly painterly.
But she returned to figuration after moving to Seoul in 2003. Her new figuration, unlike her earlier work, was representational but not realistic. Her subject matter also changed from people in general to women and from women to women as wives and mothers, the evolution gradual, organic. One painting with its lovely title, Having a Cup of Coffee with You is always Fragrant (2009) is dedicated to her husband. However, it was the complex relationships that she had with her two children, in particular her son, as they were growing up that deeply absorbed her in those years, prompting her to think about the vulnerability and fragility of those under her care, the nature of love and the nature of the home and the role and influence of women within its circumscribed and intimate rooms. In 2011, she made the first of numerous images that explored motherhood. It was a painting of a single silhouetted robed figure in brilliant orange. Looming over nebulous houses, mountains, the slender form, floating in the foreground, is regally elongated, her neck curved so that it is looking downward. She seems to represent a universal mother goddess (think of ethereal Byzantine Madonnas) connecting the celestial realm with the earthly, the pale, clouded world below seemingly under her benevolent, tender care.
Yang has a streak of the fantasist, the spiritualist, and the dreamer in her and she invests her vision of mothers, of women, with an imaginative verve and gracefulness that is both idiosyncratic, recongizable and relatable to, evoking the charming whimsicality and beautifully refined drawing and painted surfaces of Western artists such as Florine Stettheimer and the otherworldly surrealism of Leonora Carrington or Gertrude Abercrombie more than that of male European surrealists such as René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy. It is a feminist statement that is inflected through traditional perspectives but the more she thought about women staying at home to take care of their family, their children, the larger her conception of what that domesticity meant as she asked herself more and more searching questions, investing that multifaceted role with much greater agency and critical significance.
An evolving manifestation of her beliefs is SY Museum, an encompassing, multi-painting project and one of her most ambitious to date. The major painting in it is also called SY Museum(2008-2010). It shows a vast salon-like room inhabited only by women. They are all formally dressed in lovely colors in Western mode, and they all seem serene, radiating a quiet joy. Curiously, none of them have arms but two figures have been given wings. They are fairly similar in appearance and all of childbearing age as if to underscore a kinship that, however, is ambiguous and complex, as each woman also varies slightly from the other, taking the notion of similarity and difference into something more nuanced. It seems to be a luxurious hothouse, an enchanted realm, a place of sweet reverie and sanctuary, a parallel and idealized universe. Two robots are present, which might make you think of Alexa and Siri, and other digital assistants. One detail is a golden bowl on the table before three seated women, with capsules that contain the elixir of life, a merging of art and science to make our lives better, the artist said, presciently envisioning what science will achieve in the near future.
Yang said that the images on the screens in the background are the desires of the women and their projected longings, the screen dissolving the back wall to depict an opening into the fourth dimension. These dreams are shown as constellations of abstract configurations, to make them less fixed, more open-ended and transient. Dreams are evanescent and elusive, difficult to remember and interpret after waking, sometimes more sensation than anything else, a memory that is constantly shape-shifting, forming, de-forming. The women here seem to have no work to do except to be at leisure, to dream and drift, to have a place to experience moments of pleasure, an ideal timeout zone from their usual round of endless responsibilities and worries. It is another iteration of Yang’s theme that explores the nature of human existence, in particular the nature of a woman’s existence with its anxieties and its triumphs and failures. It seems to repose the question famously—or infamously—asked by Sigmund Freud: What does a woman want?
Always looking for new ways to express her essential theme, Yang, a multidisciplinary artist, began to make three-dimensional figures that she calls Ottogi, transforming the elegantly attenuated image of the mother she had initially conceived into a more clearly representational personage. However, the recent sculptures of her Mother Ottogi works (translated by the artist as roly-poly toys) have become once again reductive, simplified to make them more archetypal, more symbolic. The standing female statues (an oval for a head lollypopped onto a bell-shaped body in a spectrum of colors similar to those of the gowns worn by the women in SY Museum—and, like them, also armless) are made from a variety of materials that includes aluminum. Like inflatable figures with weighted rounded bottoms, they can be pushed, pulled and otherwise tilted and interacted with, but they always return to an upright position afterward, a metaphor for tenaciousness and stability while at the same time resilient, yielding—a metaphor for mothers.
She has fabricated this appealing and somewhat ingenuous, cartoonish figure in a range of scales, from the life-sized to those that are around two hand spans high. A variation on it are some small configurations that suggest homunculi in a series called Homo Sapiens (2006-2013), an impressive project of over 1000 figures. Some are stainless steel with a mirror-like finish. Others recall a once widely accepted theory that embryos existed in the womb as fully formed, miniature humans, gradually growing to the appropriate size during their nine-month residency. Yang has produced many as improvised, hand-pinched clay figures, each form painted, unique. She associates the clay, as part of the Earth and a surrogate for the feminine, with the mother.
She admits, matter-of-factly, even with pride, that she is a mother before she is an artist. It is a role that was historically dismissed in cultures dominated by the male ethos—which means almost all cultures and if discussed at all, it was from the male point of view—but is now being fiercely, proudly espoused and explored by an exponentially growing number of contemporary women artists (and even some male artists) as one that is grounded firmly in a woman’s physiological and psychological being, and of obvious importance and irreplaceable value.
Images of mothers, women in dream-like scenarios, women as wives, daughters, as nurturers, protectors, consolers, as part of society, as solitary, as gentle, intent, as poignant, pragmatic, Yang insists on her own polyphonic, wide-ranging voice and imagery, fixed on subjects that are of critical importance to her and which she believes is critical to share. In her work she wants to balance the rational and the imagined, art and science, and Eastern and Western cultural beliefs. She also refers to another kind of balance in her art, that between the part that can easily be explained and the part that is mysterious, inexplicable. It is that balance, perhaps, that lies at the core of her work and is the source of its special witchery.
Lilly Wei
Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, writer, journalist and critic whose area of interest is global contemporary art and, in particular, emerging art and artists, writing frequently on international exhibitions and biennials. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications world-wide and she is a longtime contributor to Art in America, a contributing editor at ARTnews, and a former contributing editor at Art Asia Pacific in the United States. The author of numerous catalogues and monographs, she has curated exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia. Wei lectures frequently on critical and curatorial practices and sits on the board of several not-for-profit art institutions and organizations. She was born in Chengdu, China and has an MA in art history from Columbia University, New York.
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