YOO SeungHo

Gabriel Ritter (Curatorial Assistant, MOCA, 2006)

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: The Work of Yoo Seung-Ho
…
The Korean painter Yoo Seung-Ho (b. 1973) is best known for his series of works titled echowords in which he appropriates Chinese mountain-and-water landscape paintings from the Northern Song Dynasty (960 ? 1127 C.E.). In these large-scale, ink on paper drawings, Yoo transcribes famous masterpieces by court painters such as Guo Xi and Fan K’uan. Through an intricate and timeconsuming process, Yoo builds up the image by repeatedly writing childish phrases and onomatopoeias in the Korean alphabet, Han’g?l. These countless characters form dispersed areas of light and dark that create vague contours which resemble well-known landscape paintings when viewed from afar, but read as scattered text when viewed up close.

At first glance, the dualities present in Yoo’s work?Chinese and Korean elements, past and present, image and text?seem to exist harmoniously, butupon further inspection, one begins to sense a profound conflict between the original work and Yoo’s interpretation. There is a fundamental culture clash that exists between the message inherent in the landscape painting tradition of Song China, which embodies lofty Taoist and Confucian values, and the ironic, playful Korean texts Yoo employs as his medium. This process of superimposing Han’g?l on traditional landscape paintings relocates these older works in a contemporary context. By stripping these landscape of their original meaning, the artist simultaneously breathes new life into a dated tradition through the use of “humorous, and frivolous words that children often use.”  It is this sense of play that drives Yoo Seung-Ho’s practice and it carries over into his more recent work where the artist reaches a new level of clarity.
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YOO SeungHo
Born in    1974, Seochun, Korea

EDUCATION
1999    B.F.A,  Han-Sung University, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2013    echowords, DOOSAN Gallery, NY, New York
              she, Artspace Hue, Paju, Korea
2010    YOOCHIHAN, Gallery PLANT, Seoul, Korea
2007    echowords, Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2006    echowords, Seomi&tuus Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2005    echowords, ONE AND J. GALLERY, Seoul, Korea
2003    echowords, Moran Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2000    echowords, Seo-Nam Art Center, Seoul, Korea
1999    “hee hee hee”, Gallery Jo, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2014    nostalgia of a great painting, AK Gallery, Suwon, Korea
             Draw, LIG Art Center, Seoul, Korea
             Close up, DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2013    Buk Seoul Museum of Art Inaugural Exhibition Part Ⅱ from SeMA Collection
             #2 _ NEW SCENES, Buk Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
             Modern Art and the Idea of the Original, Ewha Womans University Museum,
             Seoul, Korea
             1st Annual Collectors` Contemporary Collaboration ? May Dialogues,
             Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong
             Spring, Looking Back on a Familiar Thing, Topgoal Art Center, Seoul, Korea
             Stories around Relationship, Hongik Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
             Korean Alphabet: The Art of Inspiration and Interaction, SeMA Nam Seoul,
             Seoul, Korea