BECK Jee-sook (critic and curator)

Thirsty, Black Water

Water figures prominently in Huh Yun-hee’s work. Thirst – I See Water (1997) is a drawing created during her studies in Germany, depicting the moment she happened upon a lake while cycling through the forest. Yet neither the trees nor the figure—who, merged with them, gazes upon the lake—bears any trace of vitality. The lake itself, veiled in the charcoal’s fine, repeated lines, holds no moisture. The forms that appear throughout the Thirst series drink water that contains no trace of wetness, sink into that water, draw it toward themselves, and, above all, contemplate it. As is well known, water as metaphor offers a potent and versatile technology of cultural and psychological association. In the Thirst series, water coils around motifs such as the umbilical cord, the root, and the home, flowing across them as if embodying an elemental thirst that can never be quenched. Its material properties shape the very way we understand these images, merging the personal with the collective imaginary. When one gazes at the Thirst drawings for an extended moment, the body seems to drift against the accustomed abundance of water—against its life-giving source—and to move instead toward a near-death experience, not only in consciousness but in emotion and sensation alike.

In Thirst – Black Wave (1997), the picture plane is engulfed by opaque, black water. A figure floats so close to the upper edge of the frame that the scene verges on claustrophobic, while deep within the slow black current, a large face lies submerged. Whether this sunken form is a fetus, a “shell,” a “weary soul,” or the large face that often recurs in other works, there is no need to confine it to a single term. Rather, it may be regarded as a collective, overarching shadow—one that can stand in for many beings—much like the reflection or shadow on water in the mural drawing Conversation (2001). In this sense, the scene in which, instead of we who are thirsty drinking the water, the water seems to drink something—say, a black shadow— is an image that recurs frequently in fantasies of thirst. In the Thirst series from this period, her “dry water” is figured as unquenchable thirst , as a ceaseless return to origins, and as an everyday sorrow that, day after day, swallows death within us; in doing so, it drives the material imagination of water throughout the work.

In her water drawings, certain motifs—such as the large face—recur, and the same compositional elements also reappear across different works. The composition of Thirst – Black Wave (1997) is carried forward, at intervals of several years, into Journey – in Waves (2002) and Breath (2011)– from stagnant black water to rising waves, and then to water that meets the mucous membrane and spreads life. Such repetition—beginning with close study of a detail, moving toward a reworking of compositional relations, and at times culminating in a restatement of the whole—is far from uncommon in the history of drawing. Above all, her drawings unfold as a kind of sequence—an iterative practice in which each work diffracts through the coordinates of its moment, whether shaped by her personal history, the surrounding socio-political climate, or her own art-historical inquiry. As an act of recording time, her drawn lines move from one surface to the next, filling even the imperceptible intervals between images and amplifying the pulse of change. In Breath, where these accumulated lines culminate and exhale, black water surges across the belly of a figure holding a branch between her teeth, while deep within the dark water a single hand is swallowed whole. Having reached the end of this sequence, the black water chooses not to lighten or revive; instead, it seems to deepen, growing denser with meaning. Considering the temporal accretion through which one drawing grows out of another, such darkening feels inevitable—black water can only grow heavier.

Swimming Bodies and Boats

To look at water is to want to enter it. Since Thirst – I See Water (1997), this may be one reason Huh Yun-hee has produced numerous works that closely capture the crawl stroke underwater—for example the newspaper-based drawing Voyage (2001), as well as in Journey (2002), Journey – Against the Waves (2002), and Life Goes On (2006). The swimming figures sometimes seem to head back toward the homeland they once left behind, sometimes drifting freely, and at other times gazing ahead toward another future. When compared to the timeless drifting or submersion of the infants suspended in water with their umbilical cords—seen in To My Mother 1, 2 (1998)—the charcoal strokes of this period carry a distinct sense of leap and forward drive. As life continues and each stroke follows the next, the once-dark waters gradually grow clearer. For her, drawing is not only an intimate sign that composes her subjectivity and emotional world, but also an intellectual method—one that generates new ideas. At the same time, drawing has taken shape as a medium that both records and responds to the external world, gradually clarifying her understanding of both herself and the world around her. A representative work that reveals her journey toward mastering the nature of drawing is Yun-hee’s Drawing (1996). Made over the pages of a German-language novel about Gauguin’s Tahiti years, its surface covered with her writings, signs, and images, the work shows how drawing’s operative force unfolds across multiple planes. Meanwhile, in the series of swimming figures, each mark seems to compress her will to translate the bruises left by colliding with the world—and the awakenings that followed—into lines of lived practice. Perhaps this is why her voice reciting poetry in Yun-hee’s Drawing registers almost as prose, whereas the drawings of swimming bodies, paradoxically, read as poems.

During the same period, she also depicts boats gliding across the water. In Where Are We Going Now (2000) and Journey – on the Boat (2002), vessels once rowed by a boatman become crowded with waving hands, sinking under their weight, as seen in Journey – Departure (2002), or drift into open water carrying coiled umbilical cords, as in Journey – Umbilical Cord (2002). These scenes recall mythic images such as Charon’s boat guiding souls to the afterlife or the ghost ships of legend. By the 2010s, the small boats expand to the scale of cargo ships transporting entire villages and cities. In this shift, the role of the container takes on a markedly different meaning, as seen in City 1 (2016) and Village (2016). In City 2 (2016), the boat cuts across turbulent waters under a Fukushima night sky, carrying a disaster-stricken city alongside lush, blooming flowers. More recently, in Glacier and City (2025), a vessel transports mountains and trees dense with buildings and houses across waters dotted with melting glaciers. Here, the boat projects the role of a hospital ship or rescue vessel, cast with a distinctly contemporary sense of urgency. As the wind stirs the surface and the tides swell from beneath, the movement of the water shifts as well. Looking back, the mural drawing Cabin (2001)—in which a small boat carries flower-hands blooming from a tree, a reclining face, and a large halo encircling them—reads like an early “tarot“ card, foretelling the destiny of this container.

In the series of charcoal drawings depicting boats floating on water, the force and rhythm of her touch on the surface remain so vivid that viewers can sense them almost immediately. The lines that fan out with the water’s movement around each boat convey not only the intensity with which subjects emerge, but also the traces of her hand and the affective response to the body’s kinetic echo. As seen in the video documentation of her drawing performances, the fine strokes made with charcoal fixed to the end of a long stick register the distance of her body; the heavy, forceful marks convey moments when the hand comes to a halt; and the traces left by sustained pressure communicate the close proximity of her whole-body energy. The sole exception within this trajectory is My Garden (2016), composed entirely of fine, delicate lines of even intensity. Here, the temporality of drawing—and the tactile experience that accompanies it—seems suddenly suspended. Blossoming flowers and dense foliage fill a size-200 canvas (approx. 200 × 260 cm) in an all-over pattern, with a single empty boat floating at the center. Rendered blank, its inside and outside alike evacuated, the boat appears as an opaque membrane emptied of volume. As water from outside gradually seeps into this membrane and fresh green leaves begin to spring up and encircle it, her cabbage—her vessel that holds and embraces water—finally comes into being.

Korean Cabbage

The Korean cabbage drawings originated from what she describes in her text Korean Cabbage (2006) as an “event”: after returning home from many years abroad, she encountered a heap of fresh Korean cabbages stacked high at a neighborhood market. In that moment, she writes that “the water I had long sought elsewhere entered inside me.” Through these drawings—where she, the cabbage, and we who look at it all come to hold and embrace water—the modern imagination of water, long separated from the body and flowed outside it for centuries, is shaken. In truth, it has not been long since water was abstracted into chemical symbols and treated as an object to be managed and aesthetically appreciated. The period in which water became fixed as an objectified element of externalized element of nature largely belongs to the eighteenth-century West—an instant when placed against the deep history of the Earth. Yet in that brief span, the modern institutionalization of water—its transformation into a measurable and controllable resource—accelerated real water crises and ultimately became one of the most definitive signs of planetary collapse. At the same time, by expelling and distancing themselves from water, humans came to imagine an illusion of autonomy, positioning water as something to be controlled or aesthetically observed. Thus, when she writes that water came into her, the phrase goes far beyond a personal sensory moment or a shift in individual awareness. It marks the instant when obstructed waters begin to circulate again—when suppressed fluidity and co-existence are restored—opening a new channel for imagining water, a scene memorable for the way it signals this renewed flow.

All living beings are made of water. We emerge from water and return to water, and nothing can contain or seal water forever. Astrida Neimanis writes that within this continual circulation, our bodies become entangled with other forms of life, with air and earth, with objects, and with the planetary presences she calls “bodies of water.” As bodies of water, we too seep into the world and into one another, flowing through ontological conditions in which relationality and responsiveness, gender and ecology, emotion and memory, ethics and climate intersect. When ripples stir the dark, heavy water and waves begin to rise, then, the moment that water seeps into the body of the cabbage, it becomes still and clear. Just as the image is about to tip toward a higher degree of abstraction, the water that had pooled inside is released outwart again. It bursts forth freely—as crater water enclosed by high mountains, as seawater whose surface is overflown by airplanes, or as water held within an island that opens onto the sea—giving rise to a multitude of cabbage landscapes. At times, these landscapes resolve into the mountain contours inside a rice bowl or into the crater lake atop Baekdu Mountain. Thus, in the “animation” of her drawings—where forms fly, wither, merge, and transform—the cabbage that holds water becomes more than a vegetal metamorphosis embodying her experience and awareness. It emerges instead as a figure, a character that stands in for “bodies of water.” When the water imagery that once moved from boat to cabbage passes through and beyond the cabbage itself, flowing into a more-than-human hydrocommons, the cabbage character opens porous waterways through the Anthropocene present, where the boundaries between human and nonhuman are drawn and unsettled.

Huh Yun-hee has depicted cabbages in numerous works, ranging from small and large drawings to mural drawings and paintings. In those pieces where she lays down acrylic as a ground or background before drawing with charcoal, the color itself becomes as prominent as the cabbage form. The blue tones across the surface convey, in material terms, the sensations embodied by water—its transparency and buoyancy, its sinking and resting points, its capacities to cleanse or to stain. In Blue Korean Cabbage (2017), which depicts a single large cabbage rendered against an expanse of blue with a small airplane tucked into a corner of the sky, the blue operates as a sensory medium that links sea and sky, the water channels running through the cabbage stem, and the internal waves held within the cabbage. The subtle shifts in blue, bleeding or drifting according to their position, reveal moments of chance and difference. That “blue” stands in for water is a social convention. Yet when blue acrylic merges with charcoal made from burned wood to build up the expanse of hanji (Korean traditional paper), the encounter generates a specific bodily response in the viewer and forms a material–semiotic field in which meaning and matter, culture and nature become entwined.

Glacier Behind the Red-bark Oak

In 2022, she relocated her studio and home from Seoul to Jeju. In the works that followed, the green acrylic used in Green Korean Cabbage (2020) intensifies in saturation, extending the earlier blue tonality to visualize another latent potential of water. In the Red-Bark Oak is Alive (2025) series, the saturated green acrylic conveys the life force of photosynthesis, revealing a material–semiotic dimension in which water and light converge. After relocating to Jeju, she encountered the red-bark oak during her frequent walks near her studio, particularly in the Jeju Gotjawal Provincial Park. Classified as an Endangered Species Class II, the red-bark oak is known for the role it has played in protecting the surrounding forest: the areas where it grows have been designated protected zones, blocking development and preserving the unique ecosystem of the Gotjawal. Huh Yun-hee had previously created the Disappearing Face series on endangered plants, and audiences even participated in her performance in which she recited the names of all 276 endangered species in Korea (Fading Away, 2020, Sueño 339). Most works in the Disappearing Face series are paintings rendered in full, vivid color on paper or canvas, evoking the form of a portrait prepared in advance of a funeral. By contrast, in the Red-Bark Oak is Alive series—drawn in charcoal over green acrylic on hanji—she crops and magnifies the tree’s trunk, placing it powerfully across the surface. The largest of these works spans more than six meters in width. This approach offers a way to retain the cultural–natural character of Jeju’s Gotjawal, the imposing presence of the red-bark oak that can reach thirty meters in height, and the primordial textures of its coexisting plant communities, native species, stones, and moss. Stepping into the verdant exhibition space, surrounded by works featuring the red-bark oak and other endangered plants, one senses—beyond the affects of mourning and memorial—an energy of protection, consolation, and renewal, felt at close range as if taken in the way a plant absorbs light through photosynthesis. As long as the red-bark oak remains alive, it feels as though the East Asian Aerides, the White Bamboo-Leaf Orchid, and the Prickly Waterlily will not easily disappear. In fact, within this space, the Disappearing Face portraits seem almost to be reborn—transformed from funeral portraits into first-birthday photographs.

Yet within the backgrounds of the Red-Bark Oak is Alive series lies a formation that is almost obscured by the surge of green energy from the intertwined red-bark oaks and greenbean ferns. It is the movement of large and small fragments of glaciers that have melted and broken apart. Since 2020, the backgrounds of her glacier drawings have taken shape as montages of mountain ranges combined with dense clusters of high-rise buildings and apartment complexes, or with massive orchids and towering coniferous forests, while fragments of glacier drift across the water in the foreground. What stands out in these works is the zone that cuts horizontally across the center of the picture plane. In some drawings, this band appears as the exposed cross-section of a melted ice shelf; in others, it registers as the trace of land submerged by rising sea levels. She forms this area by repeatedly drawing in charcoal, erasing it, and layering it again. In drawing, the traces of erasure reveal double function of palimpsest and pentimento: they record the processes of removal and layering, while also exposing the artist’s intentions of revision and replacement—the work’s self-made history made visible on its surface. In the glacier drawings, the zones of melted ice shelves and rising sea levels align more closely with the logic of the palimpsest. Yet for all beings connected beyond the human, they register as pentimenti—marks of devastating error and belated regret. Although this term, whose Italian root refers to “repentance,” has long been used in drawing and painting from antiquity to the present, in her glacier drawings it becomes the imprint of the Hydrocene, the water-driven epoch that hacks into the Anthropocene.

As the glacier drawings expand in scale, a line appears, running horizontally and vertically across the picture plane. This is the seam left by joining sheets of hanji, a mark already noticeable in the green ground of Red-Bark Oak is Alive 1. Huh has worked with hanji since 2000, finding large sheets—often exceeding 2.6 meters on the long side—particularly useful; she would sometimes roll them like carpets and transport them herself from Korea to Germany. The way charcoal gently permeates hanji suited her practice, and she continued to use it steadily. Recently, however, as hanji artisans have disappeared and family workshops have closed, large sheets of hanji have become increasingly difficult to obtain. As a result, the seams created by joining the papers came to be accepted as part of the composition in her large-scale drawings, and she likely considered how these joints would shift each time the individual sheets were mounted or removed from the exhibition wall. Tied to the region’s cultural economy, the hanji seams resonate with the pentimenti of the glacier drawings, operating both as sutures of memory and as material planes where time is physically joined. When water freezes, unlike most substances, it does not contract; rather, its volume increases, because the crystalline structure creates greater intermolecular spacing. Ice is a storyteller that archives more space than water in its liquid state—and, by extension, more time. Glaciers, as planetary archives, compress multiple epochs and preserve them in place. On hanji, her glacier drawings seem to freeze not only geological time but also memories tied to life histories, as though suspending them within a living map afloat on water. When a glacier “naturally” melts, the organisms held within it return to life, able to tell stories of times and spaces long past. Just as, beyond the River Lethe, lie the Waters of Mnemosyne, the histories washed away by Lethe are never entirely lost; they remain preserved in the water and carry the potential to be restored through Mnemosyne’s stream.

In Glacier 2 (2020), a very small figure stands in the right corner of the composition, looking out at the landscape. What, in Huh Yunhee’s glacier paintings, does this artist-wanderer—the Rückenfigur, turned away from the viewer as if absorbed in observing and recording nature—actually behold? From her marginal perch, she looks toward a metropolis in the “Northern Hemisphere” of the glacial stratigraphic zone. Skyscrapers run on into mountain ranges whose end cannot be seen, and she is nearly overwhelmed by the sight of massive ice fragments drifting right up to the foreground. The so-called flow of capital readily appropriates the movement of water: on a planet governed by capital, living beings become powerless castaways—debris caught on the waves of massive investment flows, or refuse washed ashore. As “fluid” capital heats the planet at an almost surreal speed and accelerates the thawing of glaciers, the water-made world and the archives of memory it holds stand on the brink of irreversible erasure. For the small artist-wanderers of the Anthropocene, the most dramatic landscape they confront may not be the scene of sublime catastrophe, but rather the absolute deletion of memory itself. For instance, it resembles the vast emptiness—the tabula rasa—left behind when the massive mural at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Glaciers Are Melting (2021), was completely covered over with white paint after the exhibition ended.

Peace Beneath the Sunrise Sea

On an empty white canvas, Huh now lifts her brush each morning to paint the sea from which the burning sun rises. “There is no day without a line (Nulla dies sine linea).” The phrase, found in Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder, has long been upheld as a principle for both writing and drawing. For her, this two-thousand-year-old teaching can hardly feel unfamiliar. Coffin House Diary is the journal she kept while building the coffin house in 2001, and Diary of Leaves is the record in which she drew and wrote about the leaves she picked up each day on her walks from 2008 to 2020. The Sunrise Diary, which she began in Jeju, is sometimes exhibited with brief reflections written between the paintings. From its beginning on October 16, 2023, to its reaching 258 works on October 17, 2025, she produced roughly one painting every three days over the span of two years. The reason viewers are moved by this project surely lies in the pleasure and exhilaration of the individual works, but it is also inseparable from their understanding of—and sense of shared access to—her process. The daily discipline that borders on self-cultivation, the moments of egoless clarity reached in the stillness of dawn, and the “audacious” attempt to render vast and ever-changing nature through the slow, deliberate medium of oil paint—all of these reveal a practice both earnest and courageous, one that inevitably persuades those who encounter it. This is especially true of her diary projects, but Huh also, through poems, essays, and other texts, articulates the motivations, reasons, processes, and reflections behind her work. She exposes the entirety of her working process, performing her mural drawings live, recording them on video, and making them accessible through her website and social media. Her 2025 solo exhibition Beams of Emptiness (Daegu Art Museum) includes Seasonal Ritual (produced by Grace Kim), a production-record video of the sunrise series, as well as Practice Towards Light (directed by Lee Seung-jun), a filmic reinterpretation of her working process. Within the expansive exhibition space, the boundaries between work and artist, context and text, artwork and video documentation, record and performance blur and flow into one another, permeating the paths along which viewers move.

Painted over the course of two to three hours each dawn on the southern shore of Jungmun in Jeju, the Sunrise Diary series consists, with slight variations, mostly of oil paintings on 46 × 61cm canvases. The paintings depict the sea and sky, the sun rising over the water, along with rocks, islands, and mountains. The captions note the sequential number and the date on which each work was made, and it is likely that she also recorded the time of day. As the frame of the landscape shifts with the seasons and weather, and as the colors of water, light, air, and land change along this timeline, hues rarely seen in her earlier work appear here in striking bloom. Although the series is rooted in plein-air painting, with outdoor light playing a central role, the distant outlines of Gogeunsan and Beomseom establish a clear sense of depth anchored in an actual place.

In Seasonal Ritual, the video that records the making of these works across all four seasons, the artist’s working process is shown from multiple angles. She calibrates her hand and eye in real time, chasing with her brush the sea’s moment-to-moment shifts. There are no underdrawings or preparatory sketches, nor are there the intentional erasures or revisions familiar from her charcoal drawings; instead, she paints with extreme concentration, completing each work almost in a single sustained effort. In the finished paintings, the most striking elements are the chromatic traces created by her rapid, concise brushstrokes. Above all, the sunlight moving in reflection across the water’s surface—altering the sea’s texture as the weather changes—breathes energy into the entire picture plane.

At the same time, the distinct touches and vibrations that compose the sunrise scenes suggest that, despite several shifts, this series should be understood less as a decisive move from drawing to painting than as a painterly translation of the drawn line. Her brushwork—like the fingers pressing the keys of an instrument or the footwork of ballet—conveys, without dilution, the performative qualities of her drawing practice. Whereas her mural-drawing performances have emphasized a shared duration in a single place, the Sunrise Diary series may be regarded as performances enacted in the same location but at different times each day. With regard to the temporality of the drawn line, the earlier work functions like a long-take sequence, while the later work resembles multiple exposures that stack frame upon frame. Above all, if the earlier work may be called a “dry drawing,” the sunrise series is a “wet drawing.” This contrast extends beyond the material difference between charcoal and oil paint: whereas her previous works were drawings that looked at water and thought about water, the current series consists of works in which she enters the water and thinks with it. (Indeed, in Seasonal Ritual, the artist slips into the sea to swim and free-dive between painting sessions.) Rather than treating the sea as a specific motif, subject, or consistent theme, the Sunrise Diary series regards it as the work’s primary collaborator—a partner with whom she forms a special relationship that is dialogic, critical, and marked by curiosity. Thus, when we enter the exhibition space surrounded on all sides by the 146 works of Sunrise Diary, we, too, gradually become submerged as we look upon the sea at sunrise. By joining the temporal performance of descending from the surface into the water, we each begin to navigate our own bodily channels of sensing—setting out from latitude 33.234230984046725, longitude 126.4336253576717, and discovering a route through our bodies.

At the beautiful shoreline, which stretches out toward the Pacific and is famous for its columnar joints—a place renowned as a sunrise spot—instead of quickly taking smartphone photos of the spectacular dawn, Huh Yun-hee goes out alone at daybreak, when no one else is there, and paints the scene of the rising sun again and again. If this practice surpasses the reproduction or reinterpretation of landscape, what, then, is the meaning of its performative force? Each daily sunrise canvas receives new light, humidity, salt, and wind, and in doing so conceives and quickens a time that has not yet arrived—just as sunrise already contains within it the entire day that will unfold toward sunset. The repeated act of drawing the sunrise is not replication or reproduction; it is a new birth each day. Because her choices are shaped each time by differences in weather, visibility, and the rhythms of her own body, she continually selects new paths of divergence and emergence. The resulting body of work grows outward in multiple, non-identical branches. The resulting body of work grows outward in multiple, non-identical branches. As sea mist, salt, rainwater, bird and insect droppings, and Huh Yun-hee’s own sweat and breath mingle materially with the paintings, the Sunrise Diary becomes, quite literally, a record of transcorporeal exchanges—an itinerary that traverses bodies of water. Moreover, this diary follows the non-linear, tidal temporality of ebb and flow rather than the modern conception of time oriented toward better painting or perfected results. Within this rhythm, the wet drawings of the sunrise series form relationships of continuity and care rather than closure, producing not single drawing-performances but an ongoing sequence of performance-drawings. In short, her Sunrise Diary is not simply the outcome of repeatedly observing and steadily mastering the same landscape. Rather, it is the daily product of what might be called a “sea queering,” in which water, body, and time penetrate, connect, and differentiate one another.

In the mural drawing performance Peace of Water (2025) at the Daegu Art Museum, the woman floating on the water may at first recall Ophelia from Hamlet, but she is, in fact, Huh Yun-hee’s Ivy Woman. This figure had already appeared in her 2012 drawings Self-Portrait, Lake, and Plant Man, as well as in her 2017 painting Ivy Woman. The ivy vine has appeared in other works as well, twining around the wings of birds or the trunks of trees, but here it adheres to the figure, forming a single symbiotic body. The Ivy Woman gradually moves away from the maternal return symbolized by the umbilical cords that dominated her early drawings, and, passing through the amniotic membrane of the boat and the amniotic fluid of the Korean cabbage, she absorbs through her whole body the generative and symbiotic energies of water. And, like the red-bark oak overgrown with the green bean fern, she becomes entangled with other heterogeneous bodies of water, arriving at a condition that enacts queer kinship and an ethics of giving. Now, as the title suggests, she is peaceful in the water. Yet this peace is anything but static. The peace beneath the sea is one in which inside and outside flow into each other, where the coffin and the house are crossed and recrossed, where the boundaries between death and life intermingle, and where the spectrum of light and color is continuously rearranged. Floating in the amniotic waters of the mother sea, encircled by Jeju’s granite, the ivy woman looks out at the world beyond, keeping company with the fish and the birds. Relying on the buoyancy of the salt water at sunrise, she loosens herself from the dominant upright mode of terrestrial perception and yields her body to the horizontal currents of thought and sensation. This Hydrocene artist responds to the challenge of sustaining the imagination of water and staying afloat amid the turbulence of a dying planet, affirming that art can, indeed, practice planetary care.