Kim Jungyun, Curator at Daegu Art Museum

Huh Yun-hee has cultivated a singular artistic practice that probes the origins of human existence while tracing the cyclical movements of nature, where existential reflection and ecological sensibility intersect. Charcoal—born of burnt wood—serves as a central material in her painting, revealing the traces of life and the passage of time. Her repeated gestures of drawing and erasing with charcoal extend beyond emotional expression, evolving into an act of endurance, a way of “living through” the work. Lines and marks that appear on her surfaces move between emergence and dissolution, articulating a rhythm through which existence passes across time.

During her studies in Germany, the isolation and linguistic disconnection she experienced compelled her to reconsider the finitude of life and the relationship between human beings and the world. Moments of unfamiliar language and silence became a space in which an inner strength was awakened, forming the foundation of her artistic universe. The question of the “self” gradually widened toward inquiries into the nature of the world and of art, shifting her painting toward a mode of recording where bodily movement and time converge. For her, the breaking, smudging, and erasing of charcoal mirror the conditions of human life, and within this ritualistic repetition, art becomes both an experience of time and a testament to existence.

Since returning to Korea, her gaze has expanded toward nature and life. Confronted with contemporary realities such as disaster, environmental destruction, and species extinction, she came to regard humans and nature as relational beings situated within a single cyclical system. Her diary-like series reveals a daily practice of observing and recording the rhythms of nature, extending art into a way of living that resonates with the world.

What matters in her work is not the forms that remain, but the “disappearance” that unfolds between them. Disappearance is not a state of lack but another kind of fullness, and emptiness becomes part of a cycle that inevitably leads back to renewal. At the boundary where the momentary touches the continuous, existence and nature reflect one another, and her paintings reveal the essence of life within that reflected light. This exhibition titled Huh Yun-hee: Beams of Emptiness traces her thirty-year journey in three chapters, following the arc from existential inquiry to bodily practice and, ultimately, to ecological reflection.

Proof of Existence

Her years in Germany (1995–2004) marked a turning point that laid the groundwork for the next three decades of her practice. Living as an inevitable outsider compelled her to look deeply into her own life. Unfamiliar language, new landscapes, and cultural differences sharpened her awareness of a “disconnect from the world.” The silence she encountered was not a void but a space of concentrated reflection, and her art emerged not merely as a vehicle for emotion but as a conduit through which one comes to understand oneself and the world. During this period, she established the use of charcoal as a primal material and developed a body-centered drawing method, reconstructing a visual language shaped by memory, language, and the body. Yun-hee’s Drawing and Coffin House, both created in this era, stand as representative works that reveal these shifts with clarity.

Yun-hee’s Drawing is a work in which she overlays her own lines onto pages densely filled with German text—a fundamental act of inscribing her presence within the language of the other. On these surfaces, where printed characters and drawn marks intermingle, both linguistic alienation and the tremor of shifting identity become visible, revealing a will to be reborn in a different form within an unfamiliar world. In this way, the “time of enduring another’s language” gradually transforms into a “time of forging her own.”

Coffin House is a structural visualization of her contemplation on “seeing life through the sensation of death each day.” The coffin signifies death, while the house symbolizes the ground of life. By merging these two elements into a single form, Coffin House reveals that life and death are not severed concepts but exist along a continuous line. Functioning as more than a sculptural installation, the work becomes a philosophical device that prompts reflection on the threshold between life and death, urging viewers to confront mortality and, in doing so, to ask how one ought to live. For this exhibition, Coffin House is newly re-created as a 2025 version and expanded into a spatial work that visitors can physically enter. This transformation demonstrates how her existential inquiry extends beyond the personal, unfolding toward the other, toward space, and ultimately toward the bodies of those who encounter the work.

Her years in Germany were not merely an “experimental early phase” but the moment in which her core ideas—disappearance, cyclical return, and the continuity of life—first came into view. The framework of thought that emerged during this period later extended into her attention to nature and living beings, her ecological sensitivity, and her performative approach to painting. Ultimately, this became a crucial turning point through which she came to establish painting as a mode of living—a way of “living through” the world.

Traces of Body and Time

Her existential inquiry leads her to a deep engagement with charcoal as a medium. As the remaining substance of wood consumed by fire, charcoal carries overlapping traces of emergence and disappearance. Drawing and erasing upon this material becomes a visual articulation of the understanding that “Existence is not the residue that remains but the process itself.” The large-scale charcoal wall drawings she first began in 2001 opened a field of thought that has since permeated all of her work. Using charcoal tied to the end of a long rod, she draws with the full extension of her body. Here, the line is no longer a tool for depicting objects but the trace left as the body moves through space. The speed and weight of her motions, along with her breath, accumulate on the surface to form not so much an image as a “stratum of time.” These wall drawings stand as evidence of “time lived” and can be understood as manifestations of life continually renewed through the body’s every gesture.

What is especially significant in her charcoal wall drawings is the “erasure” that follows their completion. After finishing each work, she returns the surface to a white field. This gesture is not an act of loss but a practice of impermanence—an acceptance that nothing remains forever. The traces of brushwork, the fragments of charcoal, and the smudges left by wiping come to reveal a clearer sense of existence precisely through the process of disappearance. The fact that nothing is meant to remain renders each moment all the more vivid as a record.

The new work Peace of Water, presented in this exhibition, extends the principles of her performative painting into the image of nature. Through the figure of a woman submerged in water, she depicts a point where the “rhythm of the body” meets the “breath of nature.” Water—long associated for her with fear and survival—is reimagined here as a tranquil space in which the body can fully surrender. The silhouette that sways with the current and the soft diffusion of charcoal reveal a process in which existence and nature permeate one another, translating the structure of “body–time–disappearance” cultivated in her wall drawings into a scene of the natural world.

In this way, her charcoal wall drawings ultimately converge on a single question: “What constitutes existence—the things that remain or the things that disappear?” For her, disappearance is not a state of lack but another form of fullness. The wall drawing vanishes, yet the act endures; the image is erased, yet the fact that the body was once there is recorded. Through this, her charcoal practice expands the boundaries of painting, quietly yet powerfully testifying that art is not about “leaving something behind,” but about “living through” the act itself.

Ecological Existence

After returning to Korea, her gaze widened toward a broader field of relations. If her isolation in Germany prompted questions about the “self,” her subsequent work expanded into a heightened sensitivity to the world surrounding human life—particularly nature and living beings. This shift is more than a change in subject matter; it can be read as a response to the signs of our time, including climate crisis, disaster, and the threat of extinction. For her, nature becomes a companion in breathing and living, a presence with which one forms a reciprocal relationship. The bundle of Korean cabbages she encountered upon coming home after many years abroad was not merely a vegetable but a symbol that invoked roots, sustenance, and vitality. From this point on, nature in her paintings comes to embody sentiments of memory, restoration, and welcome. It marks the emergence of a sensibility in her practice in which humans and nature share a common breath.

In the Glacier series, she places the Earth’s deep time alongside the fissures of human civilization within a single frame. The glacier becomes a repository of ecological memory compressed over tens of thousands of years, yet it is also the first to bear the wounds inflicted by human greed and development. By positioning the glacier beside the city, the work moves beyond a simple cautionary message and reveals that we stand on the same line of fate. This perspective extends to the faces of individual living beings. Disappearing Face is a work that confronts endangered plants in a direct, frontal gaze—an ethical mode of painting that goes beyond documentation to face existence itself. To depict a life on the verge of disappearance is not an act of representation but a performative practice that inscribes her provisional relationship with the living being she encounters. Red-Bark Oak is Alive shows, through the simple yet resonant statement “is alive,” that she does not stand as a witness to decline but in a position that affirms and supports what continues to live.

Diary of Leaves and Sunrise Diary mark the point at which her ecological sensibility emerges with the greatest delicacy. The act of drawing the leaves she gathers each day and recording the sun that rises every morning does not originate in grand discourse but in the moment where the time of nature intersects with her own. Painting becomes both a practice and a meditation, and nature becomes a space of healing and a source of life. These diary-like works establish a quiet pictorial ritual in which thought and emotion, observation and breath coexist on a single surface.

The final chapter, “Ecological Existence,” ultimately leads to a single question: “What do we see, and how do we choose to live, in a world that is disappearing before us?” The nature that appears in her work is not a picturesque landscape but a site of thought where the time of disappearance and the time of life overlap—where human vulnerability meets the possibility of renewal. Rather than offering a grand solution, she offers a quiet response through daily observation, encounters with small living beings, an attitude of accepting disappearance, and the repeated act of drawing again. As the concluding section of the exhibition, “Ecological Existence” represents the expanded resolution her practice has reached, serving as a space where the ethics of life and coexistence are posed in visual form.

Her art forms a cyclical structure that begins in the interior life of one individual and expands outward into questions about life and the world. Within this movement—where emergence and dissolution, disappearance and trace interlock—she seeks to reawaken a sensibility through which humans might once again feel themselves living alongside nature.

Beams of Emptiness

The exhibition title Beams of Emptiness draws from her own poetry and works, symbolizing the cycle of fullness and void, emergence and disappearance. It is not a simple paradox, but a phrase that encapsulates a practice of finding meaning within disappearance and calling forth new life from emptiness. By rendering this cycle visible, her work offers a metaphor for the essence of life itself.

Huh Yun-hee: Beams of Emptiness traces her journey from existential inquiry to the cycles of life and the reflections of ecology, inviting us to reconsider the relationship between existence and the world beyond the inner life of a single individual. The exhibition quietly asks us what we choose to discover—and what we choose to carry forward—amid the things that are disappearing.

Disappearance is not an end but a beginning, and emptiness is not a void but a form of fullness. It is in this paradoxical moment that her art holds its deepest and widest light. And that light lingers quietly within us.