By Lee Youngwook, Art Critic

In this solo show Huh Yun-hee presents two 200-ho scale drawing series using charcoal: It Was Exceptionally Starry That Night, and Destroyed Feet addressing Fukushima where nuclear disaster broke out following an earthquake and tsunami one year ago. These series are imaginary recompositions of the horrible sights of Fukushima right after the disaster. Stars particularly shining in the night sky, weird darkness wrapping the city, houses and cars swept by the tsunami, and mountains and fields surrounded by black smoke from the faraway nuclear power plant —— Looking at these scenes with devastated eyes, we fall into profound doubt and question.

This exhibition is held in three years after her 2009 show. This exhibition shows her art underwent profound change after 2009. Before the show and during study overseas (1996-2003) Huh concentrated on addressing an individual’s existence and their inner life. The motifs in her work were the solitary soul concealed under the inner world, despair caused by conflict and oppression, aspiration for warm-heartedness to improve life’s sterility, and awareness of uprooted, fluid life. Her works are attractive with a poetic metaphor fusing these motifs with natural things. Uttered words become flowers and fall to the ground, a face coming out of a face turns to a fruit, and a woman closes her ears to the land to hear an inner voice ——- Her drawings featuring unique, earnest imagination of a world responding to a view of pantheistic nature, a world where human life is incongruous and simultaneously harmonious with nature.

Recently, I was awakened to her work. Although hiking with her as a member of the same hiking group and joining many daily occasions with her in a few years, I did not always pay particular attention to her work. Not long ago however, her work poignantly touched and infiltrated my body. Her work, self-healing through expression of individual suffering and aspiration, leads us to beautiful gestures of all living creatures. While depicting an enormous Chinese cabbage whose inside contains water like a lake on a wall of the SOMA Museum of Art in 2006, Huh said “I have returned home after completing many years of study in Germany. One day I went to a nearby market alone after taking a rest from the fatigue of my journey, I felt morning sunlight shining brightly. There were cabbages piled up at a grocer. I suddenly burst into tears. —— I have always yearned for faraway places and tried to leave home. I have always depicted water, but the water slopped only outside. The water now enters inside my world.”

Huh displays this oil painting series featuring cabbages in the show. Does she step into daily vulgar beauty? Another series Cabbage Withered seems to embody this beauty. The feet series on display is also understood in this context. While in her previous drawings tree stems grow over feet stepping on the ground, in this work feet infiltrate the darkness of underground and shine there, overcoming the scars caused by this darkness.

Works on display at the exhibition addressing cabbages, feet, and Fukushima shows a conclusion of change. Huh moves her eyes to more concrete reality and daily life from the inner world. And then, she looks here and now she is located. She is no longer a lonely soul. Her life becomes abundant with the realization that human life is limited, and her aspiration for warmth of life and soaring seems to be in affection and pity for us.

The Fukushima series also shows this change. These drawings simultaneously adopting such elements as metaphor and depiction, modification and overstatement depicts a disaster through the contrast of light and darkness. A disaster brought up by a limited human’s unlimited desire, particularly starry night, and black smoke over the feet damaged cover all. There is no room for affection, pity, and solitude. The flow and arrangements of small and large stars, part of the wounded feet shining brightly, and the outline of the feet overlapping with a mountain ridge draw my attention. She seems to raise a question. Are our daily lives and peace so precarious in this reality?

Huh said she recently read and was deeply fascinated by environmental philosophy. Recent change in her work was perhaps caused by this. As her work shows, it is the best representation of affinity with nature. Which words we can add to the importance of nature and the environment as the basis of our life and happiness? Huh also summarizes her change with the words “From me to us”. Art is surely a passageway guiding me to us, but it also refuses us; is not based on me. We must not fear any thought or art arousing new history and identity even though change, newness, and movement are caused by power that is in need of such elements. Her work inspires me to ask lots of questions.