Yang Soon Yeal’s art is a reflection of herself, and the direction of her art is her own personal direction. She does not aspire to follow the trends or to copy the styles that other artists find seductive. Rather she follows her own path. As a consummate artist, she is interested in her own fantasies and her ability to transform what she imagines into a tragic-comic vision of the human condition. As a highly self-reflective artist, Yang maintains her own idea of form through her indelible understanding of color, space, gesture, line, and shape. These elements move simultaneously in two directions. They contribute both to the intimate scope of her subject matter and to the occasional epic grandeur found within her paintings. Her poetic fantasies offer a delicate balance on the edge of reality. Her understated stylistic vocabulary lends concrete substance to her pronounced, yet idiosyncratic interpretations of dreams. Her vocabulary of images reveals the need to transform reality into fantasy. She paints what she feels in relation to what her sensations tell her. Her paintings evolve as a circumlocution of effects. There is little separation between feeling, knowing, and seeing. For Yang, these sensate qualities constitute a single interactive process, inseparable from one another. In her painting, The Bird of Soul (2009), a group of figurative silhouettes are openly spaced against a red background, with large white birds sitting atop each person’s head. In this painting, the brushwork appears to penetrate some kind of mystical essence that hovers within the human condition, a condition she understands and envisions as the source that connects fantasy with he sense of pictorial reality.
Dream & Love series
In studying the works of Yang Soon Yeal, I have discovered a formal intelligence layered within a highly self-conscious means of expression. Her figures and portraits in her Dream & Love seriessuggest some kind of hyper-suspension, a tenuous admixture between expressive content and a surreal vision. I use the term “surreal” from the vantage point of the French poet Apollinaire who not only invented the word that many visual artists have borrowed, but also contextualized it in relation to an extension of how we reinvent things that we see in the everyday world. Even so, there are few artists who effectively put their outward discoveries together with what they see internally. This is the juncture where the surreal feelings cross over into psychoanalysis. We know from Andre Breton’s famous manifesto in 1924 that his appropriation of Surrealism from Apollinaire had much to do with the theories of Sigmund Freud. Therefore, Breton proposed that the art of the future should go in the direction of Freud’s idea – that what we perceive in the external world enters the unconscious in ways that pertain directly to internal needs of the recipient. Imagination in translating from the external to the internal is necessary for this transformation to become realized.
Yang’s paintings glean experience from the everyday world, which are then transformed into art. If art still carries imaginative potential, then Ms. Yang exemplifies this point of view. In a world filled with virtual affects, her paintings may return the human psyche to another more direct and primal source of understanding, to another way of seeing and being in the world. Her paintings are looking at nature in a unique way, trying to decode the messages within nature that persist within the human mind and body. It would appear that she paints without coercion or pretention. Yang retains a sense of ease in her paintings. She is telling a story – in some cases, as in her epic tale, Dream and Love – that takes a long view of her combined fantasy/reality portraits, framed as tondos, and paradoxically elegant, though armless female figures. It is as if each painting evolved over years of time spent in her studio, struggling to endure as an artist, as a narrator of these epic tales. By successfully enduring, Yang has reinvented herself through art by recognizing the new direction she must go. Away from the flowered countryside of An-Dong, she suddenly finds herself in the megalopolis of Seoul. Her experience of everyday changes as does the natural subject matter than surrounds her. She can no longer paint flowers in the traditional way, with traditional inks and paper, as now the petals have turned into abstract modules of broken color shapes.
paint flowers in the traditional way
How does one deal with the past in relation to the present? At a certain point, life in the country could no longer satisfy the artist’s needs. The more familiar Buddhist or Shamanistic ideas have given way to a Neo-Confucian way of existence, a certain propriety and elegant, yet at the same time, recognition of conflicts begins to appear as in her three magnificent paintings from the diversely poetic Homo Sapiens series (2006)
Realization
The Adoration
:Realization, The Adoration, and Desires – three of the most important paintings of her career. In these works, Yang has evolved her own language, a personal code of signs and symbols. It is a kind of meta-language that speaks from the source of nature as it evolves from the depths of her unconscious into the daylight of color, line, and form. The relatively mute monochrome approach in each painting suggests a way of avant-garde painting, familiar to Korean painters of the 1970s. Yet instead of simply leaving the monochrome unadulterated with suggestive images. Yang adds her archetypal standing female figures in a form of supplication or prayer, either addressing other figures on the landscape or vertical rocks, sacred animistic rocks, familiar in the Shaman’s gutpan. There is a certain nostalgia and longing in these paintings, yet also the exposure of desire that illuminate themselves, thus giving their own light to the surface. In Desires (also 2006), the five suspended shapes, equidistant to one another, each with their own character, their own energy (qi). They could be knots of Ginseng roots or ancient stones or fossilized turd-like forms. While the exact visual reference is not clear, the forms suggest the presence of nature in its most raw unrefined state. In these three paintings, Yang captures the meaning of desire as a longing filled with nostalgia. Conversely, all nostalgia is fraught with desire. This realization began a transition in her career toward another level of understanding, a way of coming to grips with her visionary sense of being in the world and having an adroit and sustainable urban life-style that required her art to change. In other words, her art must change as Yang herself was changing. The point of confluence was a synchronicity between art and life and, from there, to obtain a renewed sense of meaning for herself.
So many paintings point in the direction of this direction. There are paintings that constitute her journey over time, as if time itself were the product of her memories combined with fantasies. Yang Soon Yeal is less involved in capturing the external view of things she sees than translating what she sees into a stark, often disturbing interior vision of her reality.
Paintings, such as Lost the Road shows a bent female figure at the bottom of a descending stairway positioned against a night sky with a depiction of Orion clearly in view. Such a painting suggests a vivid place in time, as thoughts and feelings constantly confront her as she traces her thoughts.
Yet her often conflicted thoughts are what give her work the power to translate meaning from the external world to a more personal internal one. Her paintings make us aware of the rarified experience that stands behind her symbolic armless figures as if giving in to a sense of resignation. Her paintings represent is a way of sensing the terrible throes of being caught within nature, in the sweeping flow of nature beyond our control. Yet the intensity and flow of the artist’s insight is what attracts us. We sense the artist’s journey and episodes in relation to her symbolic figures. Through
The paintings of Yang Soon Yeal, which often suggest soul-windows, we are invited to look through them, to move ahead with eyes wide open and senses alert. In doing so, we observe not only the vicissitudes, but the potential of an unknown future, a future in which human beings are congregated in a way perhaps rarely understood. Yang is seeking to envision such a world through her art.
Yang Soon Yeal has become involved in both painting and sculpture in recent years. Since departing from her earlier traditional ink paintings of flowers, Yang has accommodated a wide variety of techniques and materials in her work, ranging from her wooden chairs, such as The Chair of Father (2011), held together with wire and mounted on a cubic plinth, to another vertical sculpture constructed of bronze cast peanuts with a globe on top. One of her most cogent paintings, oil on canvas, titled Philosopher’s Table (2008), renders a seated man sitting near a table with two bowls and a plate from which three streams of color arise containing various microscopic forms. The implication is that these forms constitute elements from nature that are essential to philosophical thought or rumination. Both the sculpture and painting suggest some aspect of philosopher, in this case, objects to be contemplated, as if going to the source of nature – a theme that appears omnipresent in the work of Yang. To this extent, one might consider that there is some conceptual basis to the work as the artist employs a combination of painting, found objects (such as ornate frames), and cast sculpture. Many of these constructions are present in her Dream & Lovefantasies, such as her portrait of Clara Schumann (2010). These works suggest that the artist is not limited to a single medium or to standard materials in her desire to express feelings related to the world around her. Yang is a transformer and a resistor. What she sees never stays the same, but is transformed into an unexpected likeness of something else, something or someone unexpected that we do not plan to see, a surprise taken from the everyday world that suddenly is isolated in time and space on her canvases or as stainless steel sculpture. Here I recall The Door of Existence (2011), in which small abstract figures are placed near a threshold, some on one side, some on the other. In such instances, seeing and knowing may represent the perceptual and conceptual aspects of her work. What she sees she transforms, and what she knows she further transforms – through feeling. The question might arise as to what feeling – generally a term used in aesthetics – arrives in her art. In either case, Yang is interested in how art reflects these ideas somewhat, though not entirely as a dialectical system. In some ways, this comes close to the nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel, for all we might know is the cross-legged man sitting at the table in her painting.
In her large-scale painting titled Awakening The Sea of Time (2012)reveals an open seascape with small islands. The upper edge of the painting suggests a dream narrative, largely painted in earth tines, while the blue-toned seascape below suggest light and fresh open with a vertical line in red, blue, green, and yellow, reaching from one island to a cloud above. One might interpret Awakening The Sea of Time as a vision of the unconscious or the history of experiences stored with her unconscious, a Jungian vision of events transformed into a dream sequence, while the sea and sky suggest the proximity of a conscious mind entering into the present tense. Another, more complex mural-size vista, celebrating her female subjects, appears in a major work from Dream & Love (2008-2010). Here a large horizontal painting depicts two varying lateral sections: the activities of fourteen armless women in evening gowns in the lower half, and a wall of abstract murals with painted forms resembling the abstract works of Miro and Arp across the upper register, floating against sections of the wall painted in read, blue, and white. There is something theatrical about this work, a scenario for an opera in which the armless women appear poised, but strangely inactive. They are placed throughout the stage mostly in static positions. Still, the compelling aspect of this painting is their dream-like positioning. They are either seated, bowing, or standing, but uniformly dressed in formal gowns. Their faces appear pleasant, without strain. Yet there is a hint of imposed concealment about them, an unknown force that prevents them from acting out their feelings. They are bound together in secrecy, yet at the same time any real contact is forbidden. While this mural from Dream & Love makes this feeling explicit on an epic scale reminiscent of theater, the manners of expression between the women is not only present here. It would seem to exist as a persistent theme throughout Yang’s recent oeuvre.
Earlier I mentioned the bifurcated aspect of Yang Soon Yeal’s work, that it could move either in the direction of intimacy or epic scale. In either case, her visual poetry evolves according to a similar formal approach, whether she is painting large or small, on a canvas or in three-dimensional space. I would further suggest that some of Ms. Yang’s paintings, including some of her mixed media works, combine bother intimacy of feeling and epic scale. Clearly, the Dream & Love mural (2008 – 2010) is one of these.
The scale and complexity of this work further accentuate the ambiguity of feeling in this work. One portion of the mural is particular illuminating as five women sit around a circular table looking at objects that appear related to images Yang has used in both other paintings and sculptures. Yet because the women have no arms (or hands), they simply observe the objects. They have no tactile relationship to them other than through their retinal gaze.
Perhaps, in this sense, there is a certain element of erotic control. The objects become like fetishes that delight the physical senses, but cannot be touched. In Dream & Love, everything is fixed in its place. Nothing moves from the outside in or from the inside out of the frame. The stage is set, which might also suggest that the fate of these women is also fixed in time. This notion of fate is less Buddhist one than Neo-Confucian in its origin, a sentiment that continues to reside in the Korean mind-set since the imposed close of the Joseon Dynasty in 1910.
One might add once again that the burden of tradition and history is embedded in this painting as it not only combines an intimacy of feeling with epic scale, but also functions as a signifier of complacency and control among women forced into a role from the past as the outside world – the world outside of Dream & Love – continues to pass them by. Much to its credit, the work sustains no particular judgment regarding this issue. In its own terms, the painting is a fascinating and profound work of art, not only in terms of the artist’s resilient and definitive stylistic maneuvers in her ability to paint, but also as a statement on many levels: gender, society, religion, and politics. One might add two other paintings worthy of this these themes where intimacy is represented without necessarily the use of an epic scale: Rendezvous (2010) and Having a Cup of Coffee with You is Always Fragrant (2009) . In the first instance there is a reminiscence of solitude, while the second admits a sense of companionship. Both paintings contain a strong sentimental underpinning. Whereas the first is an exterior view of nature’s void where the standing figure is an archetypal form, a silhouette of a woman dressed in a loose fitting gown, but not precisely a hanbo. She has a long neck extended forward as if looking downwards in a moment of supplication or prayer. This figure is repeated throughout the artist’s work since 2006, if not earlier. In the second, the theme is closer to Philosopher’s Table in terms of color, structure, and mood. The difference between the paintings suggests two sides of the artist’s thought process.
The Mother paintings from 2012 – on of her latest series of works – takes the darkness out of the space and fills it with light. More emphasis is given to the touch rather than to the modeling of the paint as in the larger mural paintings from Dream & Love. Although the tribute given to her subject is the basis for this series, the formal effects of Yang’s paintings are truly remarkable and offer the most lucid and vital sensory meaning in a single group of works beyond anything Yang has previously done. There is a lightness on the surface of these works and a clarity of vision in the manner she paints the figure to ground relationship that is beyond reproach. The use of the abstract, emblematic, and representational forms in these paintings appear to move together with an efficacy that allows one to absorb the painting and by absorbing it to give it an intentional status within the mind of the perceiver. This is a true accomplishment. These works not only feel close to the subject of motherhood, but also express it in a way that goes without pretention or artifice. It is simply exceptional work.
The lingering question regarding the work of Yang Soon Yeal is as much aesthetic as it is social and economic: Does the artist have the right to change her direction, to alter her course and explore new territory? From the point of view of the artist, she should have the freedom to do whatever she wants. This is the romantic way of art: to accept freedom as the guiding light of one’s efforts. However, the “art world” (or, the international art market) offers a contrasting point of view, perhaps enlightened than that of the artist. Here one may find a significant contrast between the inner-necessity of the artist and the external demands of the art world. While the external demands emphasize conformity and growth in sales, they are less about aesthetics and more pronounced in relation to social demeanor and economic gain. For many artists, the point of view that art could be reduced to such a state of affairs is intolerable. In the context of these diverse opinions, one might consider the fact that the market in contemporary art – in which one invests in art – is a relatively recent idea. This is not to deny that for centuries artists have sold their works to benefactors, collectors, and institutions. Rather it questions whether investing in art with the expectation than one will accrue profits far greater than one’s investment in a relatively short period of time is a good idea. Some artists enjoy seeing the profit margin on their art grow beyond all reasonable expectations. Other artists are content simply to make their art and earn enough money to support themselves and their families. They are also quite happy and satisfied that it is still possible to function as an artist on their own terms in an aggressive, competitive, and often chaotic corporate marketplace. The intrusion is very real, even if they choose to remove themselves from it by turning the business and promotional affairs over to a gallery or agent. Amid these social and economic pressures, the true artist must struggle in order to move in a direction where changes in their work become necessary and inevitable. This is the way of art, but not always the way of business. If the artist is not free to change, art merely becomes a commodity in an overly saturated commercial market – along with everything else. Art should be special. It should resist conformity, and become a source of delight and true knowledge. The art of Yang Soon Yeal is precisely that.
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Robert C. Morgan, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus in Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is a painter, curator, international critic, and lecturer, and has written many books, monographs, and essays on artists and the impact of globalization on the future of art. His voluminous writings are now translated into 18 languages, with a book forthcoming in Mandarin in December 2012. The first recipient of the Arcale prize in International Art Criticism (Salamanca, 1999), Dr. Morgan was inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg in 2011.
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