Monograph dedicated to the practice of the South Korean-German artist, painted works that articulate her visions in ever more expansive formats since 2012.
Jongsuk Yoon's gestural, vividly colored "landscapes of the soul" are not merely representations of nature but poetically charged spaces of encounter where imagination, memory, and cultural affiliations overlap. In her painterly approach to Kŭmgangsan—the mountain range on the border between North and South Korea—the artist refers to the political dimension of historical murals. Oscillating between paradigms of East Asian traditions and Western modernism, Yoon's transcultural visual language renders landscape, beyond national topographies, as a space of resonance where identity and a relation to the world can unfold.
Essays by Heike Eipeldauer and Adam Budak, as well as a conversation between Jongsuk Yoon and
Hans Ulrich Obrist, provide a deeper understanding of the artist's work and situate her unique position within contemporary art.
Born in South Korea in 1965, Jongsuk Yoon moved to Europe in the early 1990s to study art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under German conceptual artist Fritz Schwegler. After her studies, she settled in Düsseldorf and focused her practice on drawings and paintings that hover in the space between figuration and abstraction. In works on paper, canvas, as well as directly on walls, Jongsuk Yoon creates charged and dreamlike color field landscapes that reflect her interests in both European and American Modernism and East Asian traditions.
