Cultural Topography of Pigment

A sense of being “in between” seems always to lie at the heart of Jongsuk Yoon’s painting oeuvre – between two cultures, two traditions, or two different approaches to pictorial meaning. Born in South Korea, and working in Germany for almost three decades, she has developed a visual language shaped by this dual lineage: the contemplative sensibility of East Asia and the Western modernist preoccupation with surface, gesture, and material. Her canvases simultaneously evoke the resonances of Korean mountains and waters – landscapes remembered more through cadence than contour – and the rich tradition of European abstraction, from the expressive gesture to painterly investigations of colour and layered form.

The exhibition’s title, Sansu, literally “mountains and water,” invokes one of the core ideas of East Asian aesthetics and positions it as a guiding interpretative principle. In the traditional context, sansu signifies more than a landscape: it describes a relationship, an almost ontological interplay of solidity and motion, permanence and transience, the physical and the spiritual, a constellation of opposing forces that exist only through their shared resonance. It points to a unity that is not a simple portrayal of nature, but a state in which eye, hand, and mind move in the same unbroken, quiet rhythm. At the heart of Jongsuk Yoon’s approach to painting lies this very sense of rhythm. She works without preparatory sketches, favouring an intuitive, almost meditative process in which gestures arise in direct response to the tactile and visual cues of the surface itself. In this open and, ultimately, daring method, colour behaves like a living material: it flows, softens, vanishes, and then re-emerges in new configurations. Her paintings take on the quality of airy, rhythmic spaces that seem to breathe. Layers of pigment both reveal and conceal the traces of earlier gestures, while their delicate, near-pastel translucency gives the impression that form comes into being at the very moment it disappears. The layering and unpredictability of pigment also convey the psychological depth of the artist’s work. Her applications of colour act as subtle psychograms, capturing inner states shaped by a life lived between two cultural horizons. In much the same way that her life is nearly evenly split between South Korea and Germany, her painted surfaces can be read as emotional terrains where East Asian memory and Western daily experience converge. Gesture, colour, and rhythm emerge as traces of an identity in perpetual transformation. The pigment thus becomes a vessel for the micro-politics of identity, a tangible archive of the tensions between two geographies, two histories, and the dual cultural memories that the artist inhabits. Accordingly, the notion of sansu acquires a metonymic character: in Jongsuk Yoon’s work, “mountains” and “water” operate as emotional topoi, embodying two archetypal forces within her inner landscape – mountains as solidity, quiet endurance, and the memory of origin; water as fluidity, change, migration, and life in the diaspora. Between these two forces, her visual language takes form, constantly balancing stability with flow, and the imprint of memory with the experience of movement.

The irresistibly soft blending of colour in Jongsuk Yoon’s canvases also recalls the seminal postwar American painting Mountains and Sea by Helen Frankenthaler, where layers of rigidity and fluidity similarly intersect. Establishing this historical parallel enriches our understanding of Jongsuk Yoon’s gestural practice. In both instances, colour serves as a kind of psychic reservoir, a fluid record of inner states. Furthermore, referencing Frankenthaler is important as a reconnection with a female genealogy of painterly thought and material sensitivity. While Yoon does not adopt Frankenthaler’s technique, she shares the sensibility that Frankenthaler pioneered – the notion of colour as a flowing, autonomous substance, liberated from strict gestural control. It is precisely this “feminine” logic of colour, its softness and its capacity to establish its own rhythm, that finds resonance in Jongsuk Yoon’s work, adding a further layer to the reading of her gestural language. Likewise, the large scale of her paintings recalls the experience of American Abstract Expressionism and post-painterly abstraction, formats born from the public sphere – the impulse to render personal, inner states on a monumental scale as a public exteriorisation of psychic energy. Yoon does not imitate this inherited format, but transforms it, and her sense of monumentality remains quiet, atmospheric, and always open, offering a space for concentrated emotional projection.

It is worth noting that this inaugural exhibition of Jongsuk Yoon in Split is held at the Kula Gallery, a space rich in both material and historical density. The artist showcases two large-scale works on a freestanding structure at the centre of the gallery, allowing the paintings to exist independently of the walls and inhabit the space as self-contained entities. This spatial strategy is not merely a technical solution, but a fundamental part of the work’s poetics and the exhibition’s overall dramaturgy. The painted surface is experienced not as a flat, two-dimensional field, but as a membrane that occupies the space, pulsates within it, and generates its own atmosphere. In this arrangement, the paintings engage in a profound dialogue with the late-antique architecture of the Kula. The ethereal fluidity of their transparent layers stands against the tectonic patterns of the ashlar stones, a material that has witnessed more than seventeen centuries of history. Yet this contrast transforms into a resonance, where the stone’s solidity emphasises the delicacy of the pigment, while the subtlety of Jongsuk Yoon’s gestures opens a new perception of weight and spatial endurance. The gallery space ceases to be a neutral backdrop, becoming instead a responsive interlocutor, an ancient structure that receives and reflects the presence of the paintings.

Positioned centrally, the paintings invite a guided, circular movement of the audience. The visitor is no longer a stationary observer before a wall, but an active participant, moving around the works, drawing closer to their surfaces, and shifting both distance and point of view. With each change in position, new rhythms, variations in pigment density, and relationships between transparent and saturated areas come into view. Thus, the painting is experienced not in a single glance, but over time, as a series of visual and perceptual transitions. Movement becomes central to perception: as the visitor moves, the paintings shift; when the paintings remain “still,” the surrounding space seems to vibrate subtly. In this dynamic between architecture and painting, and inevitably the observer’s body, a perceptual loop emerges, a kind of choreography of gaze and space in which light, pigment, and the mass of stone are in constant transformation. The painting operates as a vertical, porous plane, inscribing its own rhythm within the historical volume, while the audience’s movement completes the act of seeing.

It is important to note that in Jongsuk Yoon’s painting, landscape is not treated as a subject, but as an experience. The mountain is not represented, but sensed through the stability of structure; water is not a form, but a horizontal rhythm, a series of soft tonal transitions and fleeting edges that suggest continuous motion. In this way, the artist creates a visual embodiment of the concept of sansu – a balance that is constantly renewed, never fixed, yet always present. The central achievement of her oeuvre lies precisely in this amalgam of East Asian meditative sensibility with Western abstraction. Jongsuk Yoon does not translate one tradition into the language of the other; rather, she weaves them together within a space that is simultaneously intimate and universal. In her canvases, Korean motifs are refracted through the lens of European painting, while Western techniques acquire the subtlety and quiet poise of the East. The outcome is a painterly language that emerges from physical, cultural, and internal displacement, yet ultimately transcends it.

Sansu can thus be seen as a space of convergence, a meeting between memory and the present, between inner and outer landscapes, and between an identity shaped (again) between two continents and a universal poetics of colour. Rather than presenting a depiction of nature, this exhibition offers a space of silence, concentration, and deep contemplation, where the painting itself becomes the true place of dwelling. (text Dalibor Prančević)

JONGSUK YOON born 1965 in Onyang, Republic of Korea, lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
In 1995, she moved to Europe and studied at the Kunstakademie (Academy of Art) in Münster in 1996. From 1997 to 2001, she was a student at the Kunstakademie (Academy of Art) in Düsseldorf, and she earned a master’s degree at the Chelsea College of Art in London 2004–2005.

At first glance, the paintings by Jongsuk Yoon seem to belong to the tradition of Abstract Expressionism. While Jongsuk Yoon is indeed familiar with the paradigms of European and American modernism, thanks to her studies at the academies of art in Münster and Düsseldorf, she is also influenced by the traditions of her home country and by an Asian sense of form, especially regarding Asian landscape painting and its specific two-dimensionality.

In Jongsuk Yoon’s work, traces of condensed temporality, corporeality, memory, and biography intersect and result in idiosyncratic pictorial worlds that display an impressive range of colors. Although Yoon’s color palette reveals a broad range, she only rarely uses black, white, or red, and when she does, they serve as accents or strong gestures. The paintings are structured by formal elements and layers of paint applied precisely on top of and next to each other, their deliberate arrangement evoking narratives and traces of implied landscape elements. Yoon calls her works, some of which are based on a meditative painting process, “mindscapes” or “landscapes of the soul” that allow her to articulate her inner emotions.

Yoon’s life story is occasionally reflected in her works. Kumgansan is the title the artist has given the pictures that are named after the Kumgang Mountains. These mountains have formed the arbitrary and invisible divide between North and South Korea for decades and therefore have a major geopolitical and symbolic significance. As Yoon says, “My landscape pictures symbolize the theme of reunification, and I believe that painting is a medium that is able to demonstrate the authenticity and symbolism of art as a powerful tool of change. All engagement with Korea has a political dimension – in other words, pictures that refer to Korea are politically charged.”

Selected solo exhibitions: Kumgangsan, wall painting, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria (2024); October Sky, House of Art of České Budějovice, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic (2023); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2021); Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn (2020); Wall Paintings, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2018); Museum Kurhaus Kleve (2017).

Selected group exhibitions: River of Rebirth, Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium (2023); Semi Art Community Project: Boo Gie Woo Gie Art Museum, Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan, Republic of Korea (2023); EARTH – A Collective Landscape, AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2023); Polke und die Folgen, Akademie-Galerie, Düsseldorf (2019); Irony and Idealism, Kunsthalle Münster (2018); Das Glück der Erde, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hanover (2017).

Her works can be found in many collections, including AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Coppel Collection, Mexico; SYZYGY Collection of JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey, New York City, NY; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; the Jorge M. and Darlene Pérez Collection, Miami; the Zabludowicz Collection, London; Sprengel Museum Hannover, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover.