Lee Youngwook

1. Charcoal drawing is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of artist Yun-hee Huh’s work. Since the formative years of her artistic development, she’s been committed to charcoal drawing for about twenty years, which expands in variations of temporary wall drawings, performances, and videos. In recent years, she inevitably had works like Diary of Leaves that took the form of a diary where she picked one leaf per day to draw and added up writings. More recently, she has been more focused on drawing “extinct plants,” using acrylic and oil as the media. However, in the backgrounds of these works, a clear connection to charcoal drawing is still evident. As such, the core of Huh’s practice touches charcoal drawing in many ways.

2. Huh’s charcoal drawings appear familiar at first sight as we encounter known shapes— natural objects, such as mountains, fields, birds, water, stars, trees, glaciers, soil, grasses, flowers, wind, and cabbages; artificial objects, such as houses, ships, buildings, and cities; and bodies or body parts, such as anonymous or fictive figures, faces, hands, and feet. Individual works have at least one of these shapes, with her drawings progressing without deviating much from such icons’ symbolic layer. And from there, stories arise. Though developed through visual elements, these poetically condensed stories are mostly difficult to verify as concrete contents but assumable to a certain extent. In any case, these images exert an unmistakable visual impact—either they reveal deeper yearnings, remind us of circumstances related to actual events or memories, call for acts of consolation or blessing, confront us with destructive situations, or scintillate gently as moments unfold over the surface. These reach us through energetically convincing and appealing power, a place where we are closely faced with Huh’s drawings.

3. Huh’s unique sensibility and imagination are the first factors to consider. Her sensibility and imagination reveal her ways of dealing with humans, various things, and nature. In her drawings, bodies, things, lives, and their mixture and expression are in constant movement of interference and shifting. Houses take root, uttered words become flowers falling to the ground, and hair flows to the back as the blowing wind turns into a forest. Wounded feet dig into the vine-covered earth, and cabbage conceives mountains and lakes within itself while the city sets out on its voyage on board a boat. Such imagination and sensibility are enabled by not detaching one’s body from trees, houses, cities, lakes, mountains, and wind. In the first lines of Geumsan Mountain in Namhae, poet Lee Seong-bok wrote: “A woman was immured in stone / I love her, so I followed her into the stone.”^[1] Then, literature critic Hwang Hyunsan interpreted this as “the poet is actually gazing at the woman immured in stone, and he believes to have truly entered the stone.”^[2] Things sensed and imagined by Huh are the same, with her sensibility and imagination adhering to the body. What unfolds here is a world occupied by all sorts of interphysicality.

4. The body lives beyond the control of the subject’s consciousness. Organs and cells operate independently from our consciousness, like how water evaporates to precipitate as rain. Also, body organs and a certain level of their operation interrelate with the outside world without the mediation of consciousness. Skin breathes air, and hands and feet unconsciously touch things, allowing humans to walk and move on the earth. Such involuntary actions repeat countlessly, accumulate in the body together with senses and sentiments throughout the process of repetition, and form the unconscious of the body or body memory. The world corresponding to this body memory is another body as well. Humans communicate with the gigantic body of the world surrounding them through their own bodies. And all individual bodies on the earth, be it things, lives, or nature of any kind, are born from this world and return to it again, the world being a body that embraces everything.

5. Artists who detect artistic motifs and develop their work arrive at a certain internal experience. They sense an unfamiliar effect in themselves that cannot be confined to the realm of the self, touching on the effect of estrangement or interphysicality. It means the subjects open their bodies toward others, within their own bodies, as the self and the other. In other words, the body marked in their own body or the memory of communicating and negotiating with the world opens up. Confronted with such internal experience, artists are quite puzzled; either they fear this unfamiliarity in themselves or are confused. They are not used to the otherness in themselves. Straightforward and honest artists courageously proceed toward this estrangement. They intend to refrain from controlling or detouring this unfamiliarity with already familiar or conventional language. Instead, they struggle toward unhesitant candor and free expression, chasing the objectivity of such unfamiliarity and body memory. The subject is expressed in different ways, traversing relations that the body, not the subject, has been aware of. When contact with another body—that is, the world—happens, the subject turns into another subject, and Huh’s drawing reveals this progress enabled by confronting and fiercely penetrating this primary unfamiliarity. In this way, we are confronted with the unfamiliar image that an artist has achieved, one that derived from and overcame itself; we face and resonate with this unfamiliar image, silently screaming, consoling, and yearning as things, lives, humans, and nature entangle within it.^[3]

6. Charcoal, the most body connected among other materials, is adequate for expressing the world of interphysicality, and Huh’s drawing maximizes charcoal’s properties. In contrast to a brush that employs viscose colors or a pencil with a solid mineral core, charcoal is made from burning natural trees. Between charcoal and the body, no mediation or tool is artificially manufactured; the relationship between charcoal and the body (hand) is direct. The hand holds it and starts to draw. Depending on the weight of the hand or body bearing it, charcoal breaks itself. Broken and pulverized, charcoal leaves dots and lines behind. Huh draws lines at varying speeds and weights, conveying the flow of sentiments that sometimes differ from accomplishing a drawing. Apart from colors, the expressive potential charcoal suggests through breaking into particles is broader, more diverse, and richer than any other material. Based on this expressive potential, Huh conveys and evokes memories accumulated and submerged in her body through communication and negotiation with other bodies. In this way, her lines are carefree yet sensitive and sharp, intense yet soft, gentle and subtle at times but full of contrast at others—foremost, they penetrate our senses. Moreover, charcoal lines, when rubbed with hands or other material, can be erased or leave faint traces, and the technique of erasing or rubbing help correct mistakes. At the same time, such rubbing and wearing away are also convenient for ingraining body memory into the image surface. The leftover traces not only bear a texture as sensitive as touching the skin but also enable vibrant expressions through layering and overlapping. It is also peculiar that charcoal responds to the entire body’s scale, not just the hands. On this scale, Huh articulates through lines that respond to her whole body rather than her hand; the lines are not static or descriptive but dynamic and active. In this context, it is natural that her image plane always moves as a whole, and such movement is not confined to the surface of the paper but expands to walls, actions, and performances.

7. Most of Huh’s works produced while studying in Germany (1995–2004), which was a substantial period for sure, were charcoal drawings. Similar to keeping a diary or confession, these works reveal circumstances the artist was confronted with, from which desires arose—the world of her internal experiences. However, while the works attempt a self-cure by expressing personal sufferings and desires, they ultimately proceed to an affirmation of beauty that dwells within the movement of all lives. For example, Thirst (1997) is a series of drawings made during her early years in Germany. In the series, figures crouching or lying as if buried underground or sitting in a womb often appear. They remind me of states of suspended animation or regression, yet at the same time, their postures indicate gestures of craving for water out of thirst. I will set aside questions about whether difficulties in migrating, personal psychological distress, or other reasons motivated these works. During this period, Huh worked around the subject of thirst, and the resulting artistic incidents are laid out before us. Rough and robust lines of charcoal, layers of shades exposed by rubbing them, and the desperate situation still lit by faint rays of hope pierce our sentiments. Her drawings from this period are “dark” drawings.

In the summers of 1999 and 2001, Huh participated in a naturalist aesthetics project entitled “Laotian Village” at Académie Galan, Hautes-Pyrénées, in the southwestern French province of Gascony. Her work, Round Garden, was produced during her participation in 1999. In this work, she dug out a round pit in the ground where her body could barely fit in. From the nearby riverside, she collected round stones about the size of her fist or head, with which she encircled the pit and created a rim of about 150 cm in diameter. Just inside this rim, she planted bay trees, which grew quickly and made it impossible to view the pit from the outside. For Coffin House (2001), she collected pebbles from the riverside to build the foundation on the square ground where a body would fit in and built a hut. The finished hut was again covered with pebbles. Huh named this house the “coffin house,” literally taking up the form of a coffin.^[4] Her works from this period seemingly displayed the defense mechanism of someone who sensed the crisis underlying one’s survival, one who reached the last flame of life—a certain hope for the circle of life for someone who barely sustains faint yet desperate desire within inevitable isolation.

8. Around 2000, relatively “bright” drawings began. The dark layer reminiscent of the underground retreated, which used to cover more than half of the image, whereas icons that inhabited its inside came out. The most typical icon in this period was a small “boat”—especially with a face on it. A series entitled Journey (2002) was made, and works like Sailing (2001) and Departure (2002) are on the same thread; such motifs might have been related to her personal history. From the fact she was willing to depart on a boat or imagined “journey” or “sailing,” we can at least assume she started to escape from the previous desperate situation. However, the focus still lies on the drawings’ attractive power. In Sailing, a drawing made on an arrangement of paper sheets on the wall highlights the face and body of a swimming figure. The facial expression of this forward-facing figure looks exhausted yet serene. Bubbles and water droplets created by swimming return to water ripples; thin lines overlap to form a network of water flow, which caresses the swimming figure’s body in a gentle rhythm. In this way, the drawing presents a sense of undulating unison of body memories from youthful moments of swimming, escaping desperate situations in agony, of the one who plans to “sail” and proceed again. Meanwhile, Departure is a charcoal drawing on the wall. In front of our eyes, a boat is heading for the horizon far ahead. The boat is full of hands aboard, each waving with different expressions. Looking like tree leaves, wings, or hands, the choir of these figures, which seem to have been dragged out from the unconscious unexpectedly, appear to propose a powerful separation, roar, departure, and takeoff.

Around this period, Huh started to utilize walls for her works. It was the beginning of wall drawings that sporadically continued until later. As mentioned, it is natural that her drawings, unfolding body memory using charcoal, transit to wall drawings, corresponding her body’s scale and movement traces. But the fact that this wall drawing is temporary and will soon vanish is a factor to ponder. We also need to consider that she began with Diary Drawing (2003) during the same period, where she combined drawings of daily objects, such as chairs, chandeliers, leafy bushes, and flowers, with writing (poems). Here, her work initially originated from autobiographical and confessional aspects and took the form of a diary, recording daily life more directly. From both practices, we can grasp her attitude toward artistic practice and its temporality.

9. Prior to her return to South Korea in 2004, Huh made the Bright Drawing (2003) series. The series was named so because the background is empty, composed only of shapes, and the empty background remains bright. For example, trees, people, and houses are drawn, yet the background is only implied minimally or left as it is. In the drawings, shapes mostly appear in successive sequences, overlaid or bound together. After Huh’s return, drawings made through similar methods continued. In Bunch of Flowers (2007), there is a small house; from its door, a bunch of flowers sprouts out while a hand polishes the house with a piece of cloth. This composition resembles a combination of symbols, emphasizing the symbolic layer of icons; it is a visual composition that integrates a certain leap between icons. However, in Huh’s work, they effortlessly establish a poetic image–narrative because convincing visual details that operate on the layer of (bodily) senses fill up the gaps within and in between each icon. This composition also leads these works to an image plane where dynamic movements are expressed, and shape interplay unfolds. In contrast, Two Faces (2005) shows the movement of leaves revealing tree branches sprouting from a figure’s head, morphing into another face. Meanwhile, Becoming a Bird (2008) overlays the sequential movement of a flying bird onto a figure’s head, resulting in the effect of the figure’s transformation into a bird and vice versa, taking off into the air. Huh’s interphysical language from this period gives way to dynamic movements, reveals the rhythm of leap and condensation, and composes stories of transformation. Her drawings, which once depicted feeble lives in static and dark situations, evolved into drawings unfolding a dynamic imagination. However, works from this period are basically made from a retrospective and contemplative viewpoint. Belated recognition must have arisen, recalling and remembering past events. Thus, turbulent internal changes were expressed, hoping for a new desire and blessing for the future.

10. In 2006, Huh drew a massive cabbage welling up inside like a lake onto a large wall at SOMA Museum of Art, Seoul. About the work, she wrote:

“I came home after a long period of study in Germany. One day I looked around the neighborhood market after having taken a rest from the fatigue of the long flight. The morning sunlight was shining brightly and the heads of Chinese cabbage were piled up on the store. I burst into tears in front of the cabbages covered with soil. I always longed for distant places and wanted to be far away. I always drew water and the water was just lapping outside. The water now came inside of me.”

Palpably from this point, Huh’s work shifted away from its foundation. As we can read from her writing, personal change is apparent in the first place. She tells of having found from within herself the clue to approach her dreams, which previously had been pursued ideally from somewhere remote outside, and cabbage is its concrete symbol. The spirit, constantly observing and gazing at her internal self, now raises her head to look at the daily reality and situates herself as its inhabitant. Her work also presents various aspects that differ from previous ones’ textures. Her solo exhibition, Cabbage, Feet, Fukushima, held at Gallery SoSo, Paju, in 2012, presented completely different types of works. In contrast to previous works where first-person perspective dominated, they embrace and pursue third-person perspective. Taking the subject of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, two large-scale works, Stars Twinkled Particularly Bright That Night (2012) and Broken Feet (2012), are the centerpieces of the exhibition. The disaster, caused by the infinite desire of finite humans, is reenacted through the contrast of light and shadow articulated with charcoal. The stars sparkle particularly brightly, yet there is no space for human expectations. Large and small stars are arranged as if floating in space, while nature is expressed through the metaphor of broken feet. The landscape of the village below, turning into a ruin in the darkness, illustrates how even our mundane lives are confronted with such risky situations.

Huh shared how she discovered and was influenced greatly by Green Review during this period. She has been illustrating the magazine’s covers since 2008 and joined their study group to support various activities. Now, she seems to affirm that an individual human’s internal love, yearning, pain, and sympathy are connected to the hope and despair of people living a finite life and a socially limited reality here.

11. It was around that time that she began the Diary of Leaves (2008) series.^[6] The project was inspired by an idea from Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden (1854), which Huh explains to be the most significant book of her life. As an early advocate of ecological thinking, Thoreau wrote in an essay: “it would be worth the while to get a specimen leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, (…) outline it, and copy its color exactly, with paint, in a book.”^[7] Having discovered the concept, Huh decided to realize it and started Diary of Leaves. Yet, her choice was to give it the form of a diary. Almost every day, she goes for a walk, draws one leaf she finds each time, and adds writings about daily incidents, fragments of thoughts, poems, or quotations below the leaf. Drawings of leaves are highly accurate, but their idiosyncrasies are especially remarkable. Meanwhile, the writings are mostly fragmented and reflect the incidents that happened that day. Conscious of the passage of time each day, a diary is characteristically accompanied by self-reflection. On top of it, the leaf drawing becomes an anchor to the senses, enriching the texture of the “self-dialogue.”

However, the core of Diary of Leaves lies in ingraining the life memories of each leaf in daily life. What is remarkable is the flow connecting Huh’s unique sensibility and imagination to the horizon of ecological thoughts. Ecology considers “nature as something existing along with humans.” In contrast to environmental concepts that “center humans and perceives nature around humans,” it sees “humans as a part of nature, in which numerous living and nonliving things dwell together.”^[8] Here, humans are equal to all other matters and live in this world. As previously examined, Huh’s works are based on body memories and interphysical communication and negotiation with and within nature, indicating a practice of accepting the presence of the other in oneself and affirming the coexistence of the other outside of the self. It is natural that her work as such proceeds from ecological thoughts. That said, Diary of Leaves could be read as a process of confirming unconscious body memory through conscious ecological thoughts. In other words, it is an act of recording the process of certain training or learning, as if this act would unfold a sensory and conceptual performance toward unknown or present viewers.

The act of ingraining every single life and memory of leaves into daily life also reveals temporal consciousness peculiar to this work. Going beyond the mere daily record, motivation for the temporality of a diary can be found in a certain obsession to protect time from its shapeless flow or collapse. Yet, this obsession with time often leads to its finitude or the recognition of disappearing time. Time rescued from collapse is sensitive to its temporality and opposes the monolithic progress of time. From here, a moment arises, a tendency to invigorate the fragmented temporal unit of a day. In Diary of Leaves, the leaf of the day displaces the time of a day into life. A momentary time and a momentary life shine together, and because this splendor is temporary, it also dissipates. So are daily schedules or fragmented thoughts around them recorded together with this fleeting life; they also disappear, regardless of their communal splendor accompanying the singular life. The fact that human time is not eternal; all human actions disappear in time, and therefore, this disappearance or temporality could be the actual condition of hope allowed to humans seems to be the understanding Huh must have gained around this period. The “diary of leaves” for every day is, thus, an apparatus that enables her body to submerge into the progress of time and preserves the progress ceaselessly and calmly.

12. Since receiving her education in Germany, Huh has constantly continued wall drawings. Solely in 2001, she accomplished large wall drawings (453 × 445 cm) such as Hut or Shell as well as Conversation and Homeland. In 2002, she drew Departure and Staircase, which were public wall drawings. After her return in 2005, in her first solo exhibition in Insa Art Space, South Korea, The Skin of Days, drawings and wall drawings were presented together. In Traces of Days, a solo exhibition held at Project Space SARUBIA in 2008, she filled up the entire range of walls with drawings, residing in the exhibition space for a month. Numerous wall drawings followed as her major medium for artistic expression: Stove, Kulturpalast Wedding International, Berlin, 2012; Bird, Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2017; Mountain Lake presented at Glass Mirror exhibition, Place Mak-Laser, Seoul, 2018; Disappearing at her solo exhibition held at Sueño 339 Gallery, Seoul, 2020; Glaciers Are Melting drawn for Catastrophe and Recovery exhibition, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2021; etc.

As mentioned above, Huh continues charcoal drawing to maximize its potential. She intends to expand charcoal drawing by visualizing body memories in dimensions and intensities according to body scale. By doing so, she also seems to wish to awaken viewers’ body memories. In this context, she realized wall drawings made with similar materials and images of her charcoal drawings on paper from each period. However, unless handled otherwise, wall drawings are erased, pushing forward their temporality. As proven in Diary of Leaves, she accepts that every life and act can only be temporary while affirming that all these fleeting moments can beautifully shine because they are temporary and can turn eternal in that sense. On the one hand, motivations for recording the drawing process as photography or video or showing it in another exhibition might be an attempt to overcome such temporality. But simultaneously, it is also a procedure for reconfirming the disappearance and temporality of wall drawings, and a wall drawing created at Place Mak-Laser in 2018 is significant in this sense. In this exhibition, she produced a wall drawing in front of viewers for the first time and performed the erasing process of this work as well. This drawing–erasing performance also continues in her succeeding wall drawings. Through these performances, viewers not only do not cease to look at the image drawn on the wall in person but also participate in the process of labor and creation by outlining, drafting, and revising the image, as well as the process of the actual image being erased, leaving traces behind and disappearing in the end. These performances displace the fact of drawing and the disappearance of an image into a concept. They visualize in real time and foreground the generation and dissipation, namely the temporality (disappearance) of wall drawings. In this manner, performance becomes another conceptual apparatus for exposing her consciousness of temporality.

13. Since around 2020, Huh has been developing works drawing “extinct plants” under the series title Disappearing Faces or The Last Flower. I assume her temporal consciousness around “disappearance” and “temporality” is connected to ecological tendencies expressed in such works. Instead of drawing with charcoal, she paints them with acrylic or oil color paints. She used colors previously, yet they were employed partially or temporarily, whereas this new case starts with a more active application. Colors are more straightforward than elaborate, lines are heavy and far from delicate, and the shapes of flowers, leaves, and stems are much more simplistic; however, they are idiosyncratic—blossoms bluntly facing forward on the image plane are whimsical and innocent at the same time, and stems refuse detailed depiction and carelessly sprout crisscrossing here and there on the plane. The artist seems to visualize them from the perspective of a witness, as if discovering hidden objects. These plants deviate from perspectives of conventional observation or matching depictions, charged with crude beauty.

As well known, scientists estimate that among eight million species of life discovered by humans, a million will become extinct in a few decades. When spiderweb threads break one by one, the entire web will gradually weaken. Likewise, when living organisms disappear one by one, “the web of life” will also be cut, and our natural habitat will also be endangered. The current extinction crisis should be on the same level as the 5th major mass extinction that occurred 65 million years ago. Conscious of the weight of the situation, Huh is currently drawing extinct plants; however, it is still foggy what the role of drawing and art could be in this era of crisis. Or rather, the fog seems to be getting thicker and thicker. Artists cannot do more than expose what they sensed and captured. However, how to discern and capture belongs to art’s inevitable, elemental property. Huh is keeping herself attentive, confronting complex situations where the crisis of communal life, personal internal truth, and art intermingle. Instead of evading these entanglements, she senses, captures, and continues her slow steps, seeking other possibilities.

^[1] Lee Seong-bok, Amazing, How Amazing It Is, Every Night of the Shining Sun, trans. Hye-jin Juhn and George Sidney (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 79.

^[2] Hwang Hyunsan, “Margins of Criticism,” A Well-Articulated Distress (Seoul: Munye Joongang, 2012), 142.

^[3] Regarding interphysicality, I referred to Hwang’s “Poem-Writing Bodies and Poetic Words,” ibid., 117–138.

^[4] For descriptions of the Round Garden and Coffin House, I referred to Rolf Thiele, “Creating Disappearance as a Sign for Existence,” Yun-hee Huh 1996–2003 (Bremen: Galerie Atelierhaus, 2003).

^[5] Yun-hee Huh, a note on Cabbage, 2006. https://www.yunheehuh.com/10975314

^[6] Huh’s Diary of Leaves is an ongoing series since 2008. A selection from 2008–2009 and 2011–2012 was published as Diary of Leaves in 2018 through Kungree Press, Paju,

^[7] Henry David Thoreau, “Autumnal Tints,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1862. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/10/autumnal-tints/308702/ (accessed on January 10, 2023).

^[8] Hyeyoung Lee, “Ecology-centered Ethics in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden,” Foreign Language Studies vol. 31, 2018.