Seungho Yoo

Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea

Artist statement

Seungho Yoo builds images out of words. Since the late 1990s he has developed what has come to be called munjasansu, or "letter landscape": with a fine pen, he writes thousands of tiny words, each smaller than a grain of rice, and lets them accumulate into mist, rock, pine and water, restaging the compositions of classical East Asian landscape painting. The words he chooses rarely describe what they form. In his echowords series, named after simungmal, the Korean term for onomatopoeic and mimetic words, the landscapes are made of sounds: "yaho," the call Koreans shout from mountaintops; "doong," a dull thud; the buzz of a fly. From a distance the viewer sees a mountain. Up close, the mountain is making noise. Seeing turns into hearing. "To segment, dismantle and drain meaning away is the essence of my work," Yoo has said. Rather than illustrating a theme, his paintings delay and twist meaning, appealing to play and intuition. Wit runs throughout: puns across Korean and English, slang, and childish phrases slipped into the dignified format of the old masters. Since 2017, Yoo has also turned toward abstraction. A single word, brushed in heavy black against a fluorescent ground, sheds its letters like residue. In I go, the English phrase doubles as the Korean sigh "aigo," and the trail beneath it is made of the syllables 아, 이, 고. In Cerebral Hemorrhage, the Korean word noechulhyeol is sounded out as "natural." Across both bodies of work, Yoo returns to an old question in ink...

Artwork