Henrik Jacob

About a friendship

Yun-hee Huh measures the world. Or she absorbs it with her body, with her keen eye, and with another talent unknown to me, until Yun-hee becomes the world and the world becomes Yun-hee. Only times and places change. I’ve been lucky enough to accompany the artist through many years to the most amazing places. She had been my fellow student in those high-ceilinged rooms that smelled of oil paint, bone glue and cigarette smoke at Bremen Art School where we drew, played table football and cooked together until we became better at everything and she became pretty good. During summer terms we camped in the extensive area of our Prof’s dressed-stone chateau in Galan, South France, during incessant rain. We were told to build shacks against meltwater floods that might plunge down from the nearby Pyrenees at our alpine pasture, and against the beavers’ work damming up the mountain brook in front of our tents. A Laotian village probably. Houses on stilts between Heaven and Earth, maybe exactly because none of us knew anything about Laos. The program consisted of Aesthetics of Nature and excessive demands. And Yun-hee built her shack. And it looked like Laos. And along she dug a hole, a Laotian hole, and everything turned out to be very good. 

The hole

was not very large, it was exactly as large as needed for the artist to stand. It was the artist’s rootedness in South-French ground, a mutual adaptation and surveying. The hole filled with water that the incessant rain generously contributed. The sky was mirrored in the water and the hole seemed like a sparkling coalescence of Heaven and Earth. And from the hole branches grew – higher and higher with the years – till they touched the sky. This transformation was a liberation. The artist’s physical dimensions conditioned the height of the plants, and so it’s been Yun-hee, too, who grew to the sky. And no one had to die for it.

The shack

Holes and shacks are entailed; a hole for each shack. And so, next to this hole was a shack: Yun-hee`s shack. For the shack’s construction, the artist lay down on the ground, felt it under her body and directed her gaze to the sky. She placed stones around her body that were to be the shack’s foundation. And the foundation she filled with stones and mortar till it reached her hips. On that Yun-hee built her shack from wood she found, knocked together decisively, with rattling shutters and just big enough for the artist to lie flat in it. “Every enclosed space is a coffin,“ Blumfeld sang, a band we kept listening to at the time in our cloudy North German art studios. But this coffin was special. Above the Earth it floated, distinguishedly, half-way to Heaven, and seemed to be a lively embodiment and a spiritual resurrection of the artist in which she could stay lying down calmly. A transcendental happening and a majestic tiny little palace sarcophagus every Laotion village would have been proud of. And again, no one had to die for it.
There are construction sketches for hole and shack in several notebooks. Opened, an observer is confronted with a wild mixture of sketches, Korean characters, and German words Yun-hee had been planning to learn: “Bewegung,“ “Hütte“ and “Nut und Feder.“ And all of them seem to be equally important. What are still words? What are already images? What’s the character, and what is the characterized? Maybe the clarity of a visual idea derives from the drama of the not understanding.

The stove

We continued drawing, in different places now: Yun-hee in Seoul – she had missed Chinese cabbage, the Korean national dish, too much – and I myself in Berlin. Here I had found a place to work reasonably and to organise exhibitions. Kulturpalast Wedding International, a beautiful room with a high stucco ceiling, located a bit beyond. It was very cold, and we heated the stoves with coal which graced the room with a grey patina. I invited Yun-hee to Berlin to live here for a while and to do an exhibition. I hardly saw the artist. Right after her arrival she vanished under a hazmat suit and a dust mask, and for days she drew a space-filling wall painting with a piece of charcoal attached to a long stick. The lines appeared fragile at first but later sharpened into a deep black, forming outline and structure. In the midst of the coal dust in front of it, the masked artist stood drawing, blurring, erasing and re-arranging. The motifs blossomed and faded away, faded in and faded out. The imprints of the long wearing process on the wall told you about the everlasting state of disappearance in time and the impossibility of a respective present. Through the mist of pigments, first fragments of an excessive wall drawing appeared, setting the exhibition room into a peculiar vibe. Yun-hee had made a charcoal duplication of our coal stove on the wall; a wild system of drawn stovepipes, clouds of smoke and soot particles covered walls and ceilings, and the charcoal remains mixed with the original coal dust of the exhibition room. In between, giant drawn flowers appeared with their leaves and stalks growing all over the wall, penetrating the stoves and pipes while being in steady disintegration themselves. Drawing technique, room, motifs and meaning came together in a unique symbiosis. Nature and natural charcoal, blooming, fading and warming: what was left was a unifying present from a guest from a different world, and plenty of black dust on our plank floor.

The forest

Time passed by and leaves fell from the trees again. This time Yun-hee invited me to Korea for an exhibition. I visited her in her mother’s house on one of Seoul’s green hills. When you finished climbing up the narrow stone stairs – it had been almost autumn – you saw a flamboyant broadleaf forest behind the house. We immediately decided to explore it. It was my first Korean forest. It seemed familiar though different in an odd way; different leaves in a different light – it was as if I were walking in a parallel universe that tested my memories and reflected and twisted my familiar world. How must Yun-hee have felt all these years in Europe when she couldn’t trust the simplest things? But here was Yun-hee Land, and this was Yun-hee Forest. We continued our walk and Yun-hee collected a leaf from the ground. She told me she comes here every day to take one leaf home to draw it. A single leaf from an entire forest – how do you decide which one to take? Later in her mother’s house, Yun-hee showed me to her room and I was back in the forest – numerous leaves on the wall and in stacks, all drawn on paper, each paper for one leaf and one for each day. A colour-riot of seasons, a capture of time passing, and a manifestation of tiny daily decisions. It was not just discipline – it was devotion to nature, it was Yun-hee’s sheer pleasure with colours, with the art of painting and life, which I felt and which touched me.
In the evening we played a Korean card game South Korean pensioners love to play, I was told, to train their mind. It was called Hwatoo – battle of flowers – and was about quickly finding pairs of dizzying floral elements from a stack of cards. Needless to say, I’ve lost every single game. I don’t have a clue about Korean plants.

South Korean Sunrise

I was told to go to Jeju; unfortunately, I didn’t make it to this volcanic island. Yun-hee was faster again. She is living for some years on Jeju now drawing sunrises – one each day. The artist’s work space is a tent in the dunes that comes with an ocean view. There are bleaker workbenches around. From a Western perspective one could assume an economical, efficient way of working in this setting: an early getting-up provided, the day’s work is finished before noon and you can spend the rest of the day swimming. This thought also derives from the radical simplicity of the artist’s job: what is more existential than seeing the sun rising once again and celebrating a new day? The painted sunrises are spiritual diaries, shimmering time capsules, and a hommage to life – and to the light that makes art possible. And – Copernican revolution – to the joy about the Earth still rotating.

If you draw a forest you have to think of a system. It is impossible to draw every single leaf, the South French professor would say. With her leaf works Yun-hee subtly disagreed with that. Still, Yun-hee is a champion of artistic systems and painterly concepts. The drawn leaves, as well as the sunrises, are about daily acts, steady repetition and capturing time. You draw what’s on the table, Martin Kippenberger once said. Yun-hee draws what nature creates; which implies change. The stoic act of capturing a current state of nature every single day makes change and transience experiential. Or – and this would be efficient – does nature draw for the artist because it is nature that decides on shape, colour palette and, in the case of sunrises, even working hours? In any case, Yun-hee’s attitude is crucial, her consent with the process-based, her devotion and her exposure to time and nature. Again and again. Always new and always different.

The quality of Yun-hee’s work lies in the fact that it points beyond itself. It creates new contexts and is interculturally legible. Its power lies in its originality and clearness. And it is humanist in the best sense of the word for celebrating mankind with all its imperfectness, and human life interplaying with nature. I know Yun-hee; she’s a kind and very open-minded person, and you find these qualities in her Art. But vice versa, it could be that Art awards the artist with these gifts. 

I have learned with Yun-hee and even more I have learned from her. Art is not escapism, not a flight from the world. Art is the world. And humans are strong because we are nature. Humans and nature interpenetrate. We just have to become aware of it. Or aware of us. And sometimes dig a suitable hole.

(Translation Heiko Lehmann)