Kang Sun-hack, Art Critic

Huh Yun-hee’s tactility rises as if clinging to a minute, affective spume—lifting what lies submerged in the interior to the surface, where it scatters. Amid a thicket of provisional lines, a search for the true line unfolds; a single bouquet bound with barbed steel—the very spikes used to string barbed wire—refuses the easy sentimentality and familiar coziness of an everyday arrangement simply by being too large. Nor is it a blunt declaration of meaning. Offering Flowers (300×642cm), a single bouquet stretched across six panels, is—cliché though the phrase may be—one of those moments when quantity becomes quality. Yet more than the impression made by its scale, what remains is a depth no mere form can confer: a tactile shock that cannot be grasped.

The stems are bound with barbed spikes; the whole reads as a form lightly touched by the hand. Petals, small and large, in differing scales, and leaves, pale or saturated, narrow or broad, present their fronts and profiles, yet none of it serves botanical fidelity. The contours are firm; hues run from light to dark; smudged and overlaid passages sit beside the distinct impress of charcoal. Between construction lines and the definitive line—through a search that rides atop countless guides—the lines flare into clarity only to be erased, then withdraw behind the figure in a state of potentiality, at times settling into stains that roughly occupy both the outside and the inside of the form. The lines on the surface are resolute and clear, yet the plane reads as if impressed with a peculiar fluidity and indeterminacy, the forms underdrawn or still underway. And by exposing those innumerable construction lines, we witness, unfiltered, the hesitations of making—the uncertain, unpredictable, anxious attempts by which the figure is arrived at.

Lines that plait flowers with roots, mountains with birds, and figures with their surrounds are not confined to any one work; they recur across the whole. Between decisiveness and hesitation, line and plane—construction line and definitive line—are bound together in a silence of indeterminacy. Beneath the forms of petals, their pistils and stamens, lines and stains hide and surface as light and dark. The figures knot and loosen, cycling on, while the grain of charcoal summons an unpredictable prick of tactility—like a snag at the fingertip.

In Bundle of Memories, figures, plants, boats, rivers, birds, and wings hybridize—set side by side and composed in parataxis—so that adjacency itself feels urgent and plaintive. This is not a systematic space but a paratactic one, closer to a rush of unilateral, unexpected questions than to a reflective order of inquiry. Instead of a cohesiveness that calibrates totality while fixing the figure, the field diffuses as it describes and proliferates. The forms drift among auxiliaries of signification rather than settling into the clarity a systematic space would promise. What stands out is an individuation that, wholly attuned to its materials, scatters the very meaning of system and totalization. Like charcoal dust, the questions splinter, mingle with other things, and persist as traces—only to find themselves back at the first question they posed. Self-searching emerges less as depiction or narrative than as immediate, tactile affect: between the charcoal’s black and its ashen residues, between the incessant making of lines and the tremor of self-recognition. Abandoned to the question of the present moment, the work secures the inevitability of a paratactic construction for Bundle of Memories. It is precisely this construction that carries the work toward a singular expression—uniquely her own, in form and in content.

Within a rounded mass, a faint facial contour appears—yet it is in fact a face revealed inside a flowerpot tipped on its side. From the pot, the plant’s roots and stem spill outward, as if torn from their place of settlement. Beside it, a figure is shown with arms moving through several gestures at once, a simultaneity that registers the body’s offsets of motion and pause. It is also the moment when a vegetal image regains movement. The will to render differences of gesture as simultaneity layers egg (nest), bird, and plant into one figure, unfolding a passage in which the egg becomes bird, the bird softens into boat and flower. The scene emerges by rigorously disregarding the temporal and spatial determinations that ordinarily bind thing to thing—and that very disregard becomes the ground of the image.

At the center of the picture, a large foot—gnarled like an old tree—anchors the field, and from beneath it roots descend, a simple image that nonetheless conveys her understanding of the self and nature as one. Below the foot, on a stone retaining wall, a figure lies prone; beside it, another person is turning into a plant, with branches rising thickly above the head and roots dropping from the feet. Enveloping the composition, along the upper edge, a figure appears as if overturned, and from the back sharp new forms sprout—like wings, or like new shoots. Abruptly, at the left, a person enters, rowing a small skiff. This metonymic approach in Bundle of Memories does not present a clear concept or a totalized image; rather, it is grounded in an imaginative logic of adjacency, where associative tendencies prevail.

Accordingly, as the actual contours of things grow opaque, the density and materiality of motifs treated as signifiers are intensified. The objects she sets side by side become floating signifiers, driving a distinctive scene of the infinite proliferation and sliding of signifiers. It is a seamless world without time or space—or difference between things. Notably, at times the contour lines between objects blur and compete, and that very trait guides both the content and the form she composes. In Journey–Departure and Journey–Wave, a boat filled with hands looks like hands but also like new shoots. The waves near the top edge both threaten the faint boat and figure and, at the same time, carry a hope for safe passage and landing. As if rendering a world inside an egg linked by an umbilical cord—Journey–Umbilical Cord, Journey–Out of the Cave—relations that meet the outside and forms cast beyond it extend, overlap, and hybridize into images of faces and fish, trees and water. Notably, the motif of water threads through the work as a whole.

On the wall with the stove, a large mural shaping the smoke of Stove renders the warm air curling through the room; those lines seem to set the air itself in motion. The material imagination that lets smoke bloom into the form of flowers accords with her literary sensibility—metonymic rather than declarative. Whether she draws a flower, a tree, or a figure, the image is always driven by firm, rough, direct lines, with charcoal traces surfacing between them to circle and eddy around subject and form alike. Journey–Light the Fire, Journey–Embracing Light, Journey–Cocoon, and Journey–Out of the Cave are made by keeping the subject steadily in view, or by approaching it with an alertness to the surrounding situation. Her use of charcoal, and the manner of its application, works as a check and a restraint in an age of material and emotional excess; the countless hesitant construction lines, instead of declaiming, press the viewer into a charged quiet. The sensation is less of “striking a flame” than of tending one—of coaxing a flower to open, of setting air in motion. It is not an idea so much as life meeting the skin.

When approaching a subject in charcoal, the medium’s indeterminate traits—its friability, dispersal, residue, and combustibility—are ill-suited to strict depiction. Even in relation to other materials, it tends less toward construction than toward undoing. These traits blur representation, yet in exchange they open a field of circumstance and invite a sinking into interiority. There is an unexpected charge in broken forms, in indistinct wanderings, in the dissolution of form or the arrest of the unfinished. To draw by way of charcoal’s negating properties is another name for temporality—passing, the instant, erasure, trace, line, rhythm, cadence—and it is an act that receives action and its object as one. It lets us witness a contest of contours—of boundaries drawn by the differences between stillness and motion, between this and that. Within these perpetually threatened outlines, the images that come into being disclose a world in which “however many relations (joined by conjunctions) one strings together, they never make up the whole; and because there is no fixed whole, removing any one relation does not determine what remains.”

The works mentioned above stand in contrast to drift ice, which, under an overarching current, builds content and form—and the pictorial delicacy of the surface—over time. It is, in a sense, the difference between a world that is immediate and direct and one that is constructed at length. Yet those immediate lines are by no means raw or blunt: for the sake of emotional nuance, they move ceaselessly between construction and final line, concealing and revealing in layered passes.

At first it seems to lie still, yet beneath the drift ice a glacier runs, mottled in an unknowable black. The moment one recognizes that Glacier and City is, in fact, a vessel holding an urban scene, the forces that drive the bow forward—motion, speed—come into view. Between the shifting floes, fleeting traces and gestures appear: like a wind orchid clinging to rock to survive, they register lives seeping under the ice. In Glaciers Are Melting, the gesture of a figure trapped in drift ice yields an image akin to a smudged charcoal mark—where the original things, the countless possible lines and forms, can be read as facets of a life. At times, however, the narrative of the city surfaces too readily, risking a flattening of the charcoal’s doubleness—its interplay of tone, line, and plane, of blur and clarity—into something formulaic. The banality of representations where overtly narrative imagery passes back and forth, and the clamour of latent elements beyond the drawing seeking to emerge, along with the hybridity of meanings, are no different from such fluctuations.

Drift ice is water in another form—an object marked by the ambivalence of identity and non-identity. Water, ice, and snow share the same substance yet are not the same. Their relation is one of ceaseless change: melting into altered shapes, or freezing and swelling, covering themselves with uncertain outlines and stains. At once solid and liquid, water and not-water, soft and hard, fixed and flowing. Against the whiteness of the ice, black lines underpin it—lines that, from the start, are laid down roughly and erased, generating a current, a wave-cleft motion. The hardness and weight of the white masses set the boat—and the city upon it—into a narrative drift. There is, to be sure, a risk of becoming bound to descriptive realism. Even so, the boat, the city, the flower, and the mountain depicted upon the ice do not remain bound to the urge for representation or to language’s bounded meanings—to the signified. They slip as signifiers, proliferate without limit, and operate as affect rather than as fixed signifieds.

In the humid zones of temperate and subtropical climates, the wind orchid blooms; here, those flowers crowd the foothills of a rocky peak—an ice mountain—rising from drift ice. Beneath it, a glacier runs. Confronted with a scale that exceeds the field of view—indeed, when one stands before her work—this scene resists descriptive parsing; it is not an object that yields to narrative classification. The vast cold, the black lines, and the traces those lines produce tangle together, surfacing, submerging, and vanishing: an affective event.

In Glacier and City, the push toward story brings a touch of awkwardness—a subtle, alien resistance that often appears when a picture tries to tell a tale. The city panorama and the mountain are not factual renderings; they work more as hints or shorthand. As the piece leans harder on scene-setting, the flexibility of charcoal—its indeterminacy, uncertainty, and non-descriptive chance, its double life between showing and holding back, between construction line and final line—gets pulled into a tighter field of deliberate intent and a theme that edges toward the familiar.

The orchid blooming upon the colossal ice rock, the ice mountain, is not a depiction of drift ice and mountains. It is a single movement generated upon the rock, a force created small and diverse. It is not a specific flower, but the time of flowering and the circumstances in which the flower’s fragrance takes root, the generative power blossoming from the drift ice. It holds at once what clings to the drift ice and the force that scatters into traces. In doing so, it shuts down a content-driven reading tied to the banal subject-matter of realist representation. And water is not a uniform, supple plane; it appears as movement—irregular motion formed by line thickness, overlaps, and smudged marks—so that the world is seen through inner force and depth, through internal discontinuity and non-uniformity. Although absent from this exhibition, figures caught in drift ice—those traces and gestures—tend to push viewing and interpretation back toward more conventional figuration.

Drawing mountains and flowers, rock and water, city and boat, and the slow pace of ice is less a realist depiction than a strengthening of the sign’s materiality—a spatial understanding built from floating signifiers. In this light, the urge to ask what exactly the artist painted is a simple, even worn desire for representation. Yet a force that exceeds that banality begins the moment a line is drawn. Motif and theme blur and become mere occasions. The people, boats, cities, and flowers within the drift ice are not rendered in stock meanings; as sliding signifiers, they trigger an imagination immanent to the work itself. Between what is described and what is erased—between deliberate erasure and unselfconscious act—the erasures that come into being carry both construction lines and final lines, and they read as a contest between layers of silence and language. In that interval, how many things press to appear? How many insist on existing, on slipping past language, on refusing to be trapped by form? Along the borders where lines and forms, planes, tones, and textures meet, they are tamed and at times resist; the boundary lines between forms abut and compete. Out of these relations, space and time are made.

In contemporary art, the use of diverse materials for visualization is not merely a matter of medium but of expression itself—closely tied to the tendency to capture materiality as a psychological movement. This has infinitely expanded the scope and possibility of expression, yet because anything can now be expressed, one cannot deny the nihilism that at times distorts or conceals meaninglessness. However, charcoal—an ancient material—and drawing—a simple and primal form of expression—offer the genuine radiance of poverty amid abundance. Huh’s work, above all, reveals a profound engagement with the delicate psychological layers of an individual and a fervent, tender inquiry into life itself. It is not easy to evoke such existential questions of human life through such simple and lucid materials, especially when compared to the grand discourses on life demanded by our time. Amid the splendor, brilliance, and near-excessive outpouring of emotion, she calmly and densely awakens, with affection, the reality—“sensibility”—that lies deep within our being.

Charcoal and eraser—the eraser being at once a finger, gauze, sponge, or work glove—lead the act of drawing through paper and gesture, through movement and desire (drawing). It is not the subject but without the subject, movement meeting movement that creates. It is not the subject but movement itself that meets and creates further movement. Above all, in the competition among contours, two or more objects are depicted simultaneously. What appears different is not a matter of viewing angle, but of the internal struggle of forces that interpenetrate and contend with one another, revealing new energies through the competition among adjacent others. That force arises from an introspective nature and suggests that “the process itself—whether as a result or in a state of suspension—is the artwork.”

Some works measure 43×34cm, others 190×260cm, or 300×642cm, while some are large-scale drawing performances that fill entire walls, where measurement itself becomes meaningless. The wall drawing Korean Cabbage (2006) does not even indicate its dimensions. Combining wall and charcoal, plant and water, growth and decay, the everyday and the transcendent, the work encapsulates Huh’s artistic world. Whether in the depiction of an object or a psychological impulse, as she draws and erases, dots, lines, and spaces are formed through images of water, plants, wind, eruption, and stillness. Yet at that very moment, the lines blur and overlap; the forms painstakingly created are ignored, and parts of them are erased. This inevitably leaves traces.

Works in which drawings are made directly on the wall, hung over it, or created on paper affixed to it evoke the notions of placelessness, homelessness, and the absolute loss of site often discussed in contemporary sculpture. The possibility of painting that shifts from mural to canvas implies the transference of place itself. In this sense, the departure from place becomes the very moment in which her direct act merges with the object, and in that instant, new forms are generated. This inseparability of concreteness and abstraction, of object and action, turns the work into a site of forces that draw our perception and emotion inward. Between line and plane, form and trace, construction and dissolution, object and deviation, one encounters the drift of meaning, and the density and materiality of signified language.

Her charcoal drawings — though not devoid of subjects — were guided less by the subjects’ presence and more by fidelity to the self that encountered them. If that encapsulated her charcoal work, her recent color works reveal a shift away from introspection toward the other — a turning outward beyond herself. What does she seek to reveal by engaging with the monotonous, conventional, and loosely rendered landscapes and flowers of everyday life? Could the sensibility of this ambivalent work represent not so much a transformation of drawing as a glimpse of a multi-faceted inspiration toward the world? Or is it about opening up the future through empathy with the lost other — through the other’s return?

What stands out in the exhibition at the Seongbuk Museum of Art (July 8–September 7, 2025) are small square and rectangular panels painted with images of the sea, the sun, water, light, wind, mountain ridges by the shore, flowers, and trees. Wonder at flowers and plants is at times an encounter with the mysteries of the world, yet such admiration can also betray an excess of emotion or desire. Her writings on Disappearing Face, composed as if keeping a diary while painting flowers, evoke that sense. One cannot easily dismiss the impression that they verge on emotional excess or impose meaning too insistently. Why, then, the need to supplement what painting can express with words—what urgency lies behind it? Might this be the lure of aphorism, or a trap of one’s own sentimentality? If so, it is neither honesty nor candor, and certainly not innocence. It is, rather, a confession of depicting social issues more than responding to things themselves. Perhaps this is why she seeks to expose desire. It is true that understanding things is inevitably social, and that an artist’s consciousness cannot be free from social concerns; yet the charge of semantic excess in her paintings is not easily refuted.

The landscape belongs to what lies outside myself. I paint the same view, from the same place, at the same time of day. The 146 landscape paintings presented here were all created in that place and at that hour. The project, titled Sunrise Diary, is “about painting every day in the same place, at the same time, in the same size, and with the same materials.” The compositions, colors, and techniques vary little—merely a continuum of near sameness, of deliberately banal landscapes. What, then, is Sunrise Diary? These 146 paintings, all made at dawn along a seaside in Jungmun, Seogwipo, Jeju, beginning on October 16, 2023, capture that same place, same hour, and same point of view.

Because each scene is painted in that same place and at that same hour, one quickly recognizes what is being depicted after viewing only a few works. The question “What is she painting?” becomes unnecessary, and the desire to know fades away. Yet in that moment of perception, repetition generates difference, and difference strips the “original” of its power—only to endow it with a new one. Freed from the impulse to know, from the demands of representation or confirmation, we begin to see the work itself. What emerges is not the locality or temporality within the painting, but a new sensibility born from the ordinary—a possibility of entering into something unfamiliar. It is no longer about curiosity or verification, but about remaining faithful to the emotion of encountering the painting itself. And yet, one cannot help but wonder: what is her stance within this experience?

Is it an invitation to paint while gazing at the landscape—to simply respond to it in various ways—or an attempt to capture the moment when, through the act of seeing, one comes to know its very substance? Perhaps that is precisely the encounter with reality that we cannot escape: something that is the same, yet not the same. It is what we meet as an object—an ever-recurring world unfolding regardless of her will, where drawing becomes an act of empathy with the landscape itself. Yet such empathy remains a matter of emotional receptivity; the landscape exists as its own world. The world, after all, is an object entirely independent of her intention, while the painting embodies that intention. Thus, painting becomes the point where object and subject misalign—and at the same time, where they permeate one another.

In every Sunrise Diary, the sun no longer functions as a source of light but transforms into a relational presence—its role defined by where and how it appears within the scene. Its size, position, and color generate tension and balance, situating it within a purely formal magnetic field, independent of narrative content. It becomes an object shaped by the rectangular frame of the canvas and by the shifting circles of varying sizes and hues that move within it. The repeated composition, recurring motif, and consistent time of day unfold as a manifold of natural scenery—revealed as a field of forces created through subtle variations in color and the density of brushstrokes.

If the charcoal works once delved inward—where only the self existed, tracing and observing itself—then now even the landscape, as the other, gazes back at her. Yet here, the self is absent; only the landscape remains. It is a thorough encounter with the other. The disconcerting familiarity of these sunrise paintings, indistinguishable from ordinary landscapes, and the poignant ambivalence of painting 146 canvases from the same viewpoint embody this tension. Each of the 146 sunrise paintings depicts the same scene, rendered at the same site and in the same size (46 × 61 cm). What remains are only the objects she faced. This is not a metonymic approach or interpretive engagement, as in her early charcoal works, but a direct responsiveness to her surroundings. Though painted in the same place, no two are ever the same. As she writes, “The passion that responds to the circumstances around us is, in itself, the very principle of individuation.” Put differently, could the sunrise landscape be not the reality of the world itself, but the perception of actuality—of each moment’s singular existence as an individual entity?

Her depiction of the sunrise does not aim to achieve a unified image as a whole. The upper two-thirds of the canvas are always occupied by mountains and hills. Above them, the forms of clouds shift depending on atmospheric conditions and the morning sunlight. Below lies the ever-undulating sea. Since the shoreline is where the land meets the water, it is less an image of the boundless ocean and more a reflection of the ever-changing realities of everyday life. The mountains and hills remain still and steadfast, while beneath them, the waves never cease to move; above them, the flow of the atmosphere changes with the morning weather, and the sun remains constant. It is a place where what moves and what does not meet. If the waves are mutable, accidental, and momentary, the sun is steady yet appears in ever-changing manifestations. Even at the same time and in the same place, nothing is identical — it is a “world of fragments that can never be unified,” a “rending apart of spatial nature. The uniformity of nature can be spatially disrupted. It is a landscape where ‘law,’ or rather causality itself, is senselessly severed. The purpose is not to reproduce the scene in order to observe or verify it, but to *feel* the atmosphere. It is an act of confronting reality, responding to it, and seeking to move beyond it. Like the air itself, “color enters into us, so that everything we do, say, paint, or write is accompanied by particular affects and dispositions.”

This quality reveals a different aspect in her flower painting Disappearing Face. Although the work is grounded in depicting objects, the floral painting does not portray the entirety of a plant but focuses on the blossom itself. Yet it is far from the illustrative precision of a botanical encyclopedia. At the same time, it does not disregard the individuality of the subject in favor of purely painterly sensation. Across some thirty paintings, the flowers unfold their petals and peripheries around the stamens and pistils placed at the center of small square or rectangular canvases. As manifold forms set against a geometric frame, the individuality of each flower draws attention not to ecological concerns but to the erotic aesthetics of form and color. The arrangement of the flower’s multifaceted parts at the center of a confined geometric space transforms into a confrontation of forces—or a contest of boundaries—between the rigidity of the given frame and the vitality of the flower’s polyhedral form. The tension between figuration and abstraction is too deliberate, too tenacious an approach to be called mere simplicity of composition.

Her act of drawing or marking does not construct a three-dimensional space but instead creates an inner depth through charcoal. Her work is composed of layers in which lines that reveal the flat immutability of two dimensions coexist with silent lines, and tentative and solid lines that compete with one another. In contrast, her use of color remains more faithful to the objective depiction of objects—imbued with clarity, descriptiveness, a sense of definitive form, and an inevitable control. Yet, as colors intermingle, they also reconstruct and unify fragmented forms, bringing her closer to the essence of things. It is a composition of consistency that integrates multiplicities into a single whole—an endeavor to perceive the diverse as one. The more faithfully color is rendered, the more faithful the form becomes. This is not a matter of visual perception but of affect—of an impulse that inevitably reaches toward the Other. “In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, to be affected is to be open to the world, to accept the world’s embrace, and to resonate within one’s inner being with its rays of light and echoes of sound. In the affective world, the object of perception and the subject that perceives are inseparable. Yet the excess of color and form reveals the need to restrain emotion, for such excess tends to mask itself as feeling rather than correspond objectively to things. Her working notes make this awareness even more explicit. Good writing allows us to look deeper into a work, yet at times it limits our understanding to “only what is written.” It makes us read instead of see. One wonders whether such a desire—to express one’s emotions or social meanings with sincerity—might, perhaps, be too conscious of the prevailing trend of blending literature with visual imagery. Moreover, within the metonymic sensibility that “privileges image over concept, sensation over meaning, and the unconscious over reality,” there remains a concern that narratives fixated on concept, meaning, and reality may, in turn, regress into the banality of landscape painting. In this sense, Glacier and City and Disappearing Face are particularly demanding subjects.

The quivering sensation of fingertips touching paper. What difference lies between the questioning of the self that arises as charcoal is rubbed onto the surface, and the act of gazing at an early morning scene while spreading paint across a canvas? The moment when the form of the subject begins to emerge among countless tentative lines—the pictorial plane where the obstinacy of outlines that resist form collide as if in competition.

Between charcoal that sinks into the fibers of paper as if embedding itself, and acrylic colors that cling to the surface with their own corporeality, the ambivalent impressions—revealed either through an inner encounter expressed in non-representational materials or through a delicate construction of color in depicting the subject—are not signs of an artist’s transformation, but of a duality in reading the world. The dissonance arising from the difference between the position of the subject as the one who draws and the attitude toward the other as the drawn object lingers persistently throughout the act of viewing.

Hur’s work is inseparable from the affect of competing contours that approach form. And every line carries color. No—every line is color. And every color follows the line. Whether applied as pigment, drawn as a line, or written as text, the line—like the way diverse synthetic pigments emerge from coal tar—flows from the fusion of the subjective and the objective, the affective and the natural. Michael Taussig said, “Color walks. And as it walks, so it changes.” Thus, color is not a mere ornament that dresses or formalizes thought, but the very medium from which thought itself arises.”

The persistence with which Huh explores materials and media—capturing the dual sentiment of the charcoal’s spontaneity and trace, and the paint’s clarity and intention—marks a shift from self to the other. For her, charcoal is both an act and a state of mind. In other words, “material is everything that approaches the artist as something to be decided upon.”

The texture of charcoal or acrylic, and the distinct characteristics of each material, embody a tension that sustains unity through difference—much like the gap between drawing and color. Between intention and the resistance of material, Huh’s form and content are constructed. At times, this tension unfolds unforeseen horizons, drawing us into a world possible only through charcoal. Acrylic, on the other hand, belongs to the realm of color—a sensibility of construction revealed through pigment, where that very sensibility becomes the world itself. In other words, material is form, language, and content all at once. “If material indeed resists the pure identity of an artwork, then the process of meaning within the work is essentially that between material and intention. Without the inherent principle of identification—that is, intention—form could not exist, just as it could not without the mimetic impulse.”

This is not unrelated to the idea that material, though physical, is also spirit—the very point of departure. It is through the act of drawing that “making becomes a form of thinking. This implies that the specific modalities and conceptual premises of creation are inseparably intertwined.” ”The effects of charcoal as a device that “lets things happen” rather than “makes them,” along with the paper, traces, and the junctions of adjacent images, all belong to this dimension. “An artist may be called an extended instrument, a tool for transforming potentiality into actuality.” Could it not be that drawing with charcoal—marked by erasure and trace, free from causality—embraces chance and meaninglessness, thus allowing the image to expand infinitely? “For even the connectedness of meaning itself is accidental.”

It is clear that an artist cannot be detached from society, nor from the circumstances to which they belong—the two are inseparable from the content of their work. Of course, a work of art is not a subject but an object of meaning. Even if intention cannot fully shape the content of a work, “the question of whether intention becomes objectified as a work may not be the goal of criticism, yet it can serve as its starting point.” However, while her work may be interpreted in relation to sociopolitical issues or ecological crises both at home and abroad, what she seeks to reveal—“the things that have not yet been thought”—would perhaps rather vanish than be confined by such readings.

Huh Yun-hee’s images are self-sufficient, forming a system where fragments coexist in external relations that generate and transform without ever consolidating into a whole. The depicted motifs are parts of the painting as a totality, yet they are also parts that resist totalization—rendered into meaning and sensation through that very resistance. This embodies what might be called the tension of boundaries or the rivalry of contours. It is a world of inevitable individuation yet indivisible duality—a mode of drawing that defies fixity and escapes intention, rebelling against the notion of permanence.

“There is something in the world that compels thought. This something is not an object of recognition but a fundamental encounter.” In the face of an unexpected encounter—an event—of otherness and altruism, the individual is torn away from the comfort of common sense. Thought is driven by the event of difference, by its irreducible unrepresentability. In Huh Yun-hee’s work, the smudges are not depictions of what remains but sensations that rise like roughness at the fingertips. The challenge is to ensure that the inertia of such tactile feeling does not consume one’s curiosity toward the world. For that delicate, irreplaceable tactility is what defines Huh Yun-hee’s world.