Jongsuk Yoon. Kumgangsan

On the occasion of its reopening, mumok has invited the artist Jongsuk Yoon to conceive a new mural for the museum lobby. After photo-based installations by Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Jeff Wall, the most recent artist to create a mural was Siegfried Zaworka, who in his work dealt with the illusionist potentials of painting. Jongsuk Yoon now responds to the challenge of the monumental format with levitating, wholly anti-monumental and anti-heroic landscape pictures. Reduced means and the processuality of painting govern Yoon’s artistic practice, which she has developed in critical reflection of the paradigms of Western Modernism and East Asian traditions—particularly Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and Korean sansuhwa (Mountain and Water Paintings). Diaphanous layers of large-scale color patches, processual traces, and graphic ciphers condense to form panoramic “soul landscapes” (J. Yoon), in which “inner” and “outer” perspectives oscillate. 

Kumgangsan is the painterly convergence on a mountain region that Yoon herself has never set foot on: Since 1945, it has been the arbitrary dividing line and visible border between North and South Korea and, as such, is a symbol of an unresolved geopolitical conflict and its still traumatizing aftermath.