The creative power of the mind, to which fantasy belongs, have only artists with experiences from life, those of them, who don’t yet have it, must at least act “as if” they do, they  simulate. Then, only when man has realized that he is unsatisfied, since he not only feels his unhappiness but knows it, and also understands it, a vivacious, richly fertile, productive fantasy, so would it seem, is only suitable for children and artists. This unhappy realization can’t be removed from the world, can’t be reasoned out of the world. There is no other choice, especially for artists, other than to live with this. The “breath of the soul” may not be impeded by the “feeling of futility”. It is obvious, that one has to emphatically differentiate between the pure depressive state of a subject and the sensory organ of an artist, between physical and aesthetic negativity. The fantasy is the only possibility, which is left open to modern art, to be at the same time positive and negative, to be beautiful, a simultaneousness of the dissimilar.

In this case, the likely point is, that the theme of Yun-Hee Huh’s work seems to lay in her melancholic state, as we don’t have to do here with an authentic expression of a suffering consciousness, but with a reflexive depiction of this consciousness, as the drawings, the pictorial forms of coloured drawings, the sketchbooks and the large charcoal wall drawings and also her poems indicate. The transformation of unhappy suffering, readable in the yearning motifs of her pictures and lines of poetry, in that aesthetic pathos is the substance of the signs and symbols that she uses in picture and word. Through this, melancholy becomes the stage, on which the aesthetic event takes place.

The practically unrecognisable intermingle between her wall drawings and the scribbles of varying residents on the passageways of a tower-block staircase in Osterholz-Tenever, in the course of a student’s project, implicates aspects of disappearance: A very successful form of art in a public place.

In the student and art project “The Laos village” in the grounds of the “Academie Galan” in southwest France, in the Departement Hautes Pyrénées, Region Gascogne, Yun-Hee Huh had in the course of two summers two objects constructed. In the first work she dug first of all a round hole in the earth, whose measurements where so constructed, that the upright kneeling position of her body could not be seen. The rim of this hole accentuated Yun-Hee Huh with an up to 150 cm wide continuous border from fist size to head sized round worn river stones. Around this she planted a hedge of laurel to the inner side of the hole, so that the now 2 m high grown hedge the contents of the centre of the work, the body hiding earth hole, could not be seen, it disappeared. The second work is a wooden hut, erected upon a pedestal high foundation of bricked river stones, a seemingly Asian influenced kind of cabin. The roof is flat and covered with heavy river stones, again the measurements related to her body size, so that the length of her outstretched body could just lie down. Yun-Hee Huh called it a coffin house. Around the hut, arranged in a circular form were planted six cherry trees. The cardinal points of the hut were so constructed, that the head of the recumbent body pointed east. The outward view of her body/head points towards the east, the countries of Asia und the rising sun. It is a longing, melancholic glance in the direction of her distant home, Korea.

With regards to the work from Yun-Hee Huh, whichever medium she is at the moment using, it is at first always about the experience of the disappearance of something which is now present, rather than about the reflection of such a disappearance as a necessary structure of our  consciousness: about the impossibility of a present moment.

Yun-Hee Huh demonstrates such tinted facets of a moment’s loss, paradigmatic in her performances by creating large wall pictures with charcoal, which after having displayed the complex work process of creation she carries on with the same power and energy to paint over with wall paint, to disappear again. Merely the dust of the charcoal on the floor remains as a reminder of a visible trace of the drawing process. And so long as there is a trace, the condition of “as if” already starts – and that is the absolute of deconstruction. Such a performed act embraces, let us be adamant, what one calls art, just performative and not constative. In a thought process, which is not a mere exchange and production of knowledge or a display of ability but deals with an event taking place, the drawings live longer than that what they represent, an aesthetic event can always give a sign although that what is  represented has long disappeared; so for example as action without art and art without action can exist in principal.

In these performances surface through the apparent absurdity of the reoccurring effacement, completely by chance out of the mist, the impression of the Nihil. The first casual perceptions of the expected will be so much larger through the impact of becoming surprised at the erasure of what has just been drawn as a deficit of being. The sensation at the spectacle, whether a video film or the direct act of creating the drawing, the creation of a work of art, which possibly brings forth dreams and undefined thoughts, that is a great pleasure, a pleasure however, that so to speak can’t be held onto, therefore what remains in view of the disappearance of the just created drawing is not only a ostensible regret, but in our souls a great yearning, it is this yearning which is a greater pleasure, than anything, what is fix and stabile and doesn’t satisfy us nearly as much as the incomprehensible, that from the beginning  our expectations can never be satisfied.

Here are gathered constitutive elements of a disappeared presence. Without even asking why, the lines of the picture are snatched away from permanence, and one relies upon the remembered imagination of what was seen during the time in which the action took place. The potential of the incomprehensible, which sets an emotional craving in motion, that can’t be constitutionally satisfied, disintegrates into a state of joy. Disintegration and aesthetic perception merge together in a conditional relationship. It’s a matter of principal of every kind of present perception, about the disappearance of the past. And in the reception of aesthetic events, we are constantly confronted with the past, that in view of the present now, brings forth as well as the “no more” but also dispels the Idea of the “not yet”. Such reflections about disappearing, not only the slow decline of a human life, but the just at this moment temporal state of my existence, becomes similar to the disappearance of the just seen drawing, only blanketed with a visual silence; the joy about the spawned success slips away and so becomes a way of viewing the uncatchable, particular beautiful and positive present.

To dramatise the feeling of the disappearance of something, one has to emphasise the shades in the conditions of human existence: That means the existence of non-experience takes place as an abrupt end before the awareness process starts, as a symbol of death in life. For which the continuing work of art (life) stands as a symbol. It’s not a step into a passage of time, but a time leap out of this life, that is out of conscious time into non time. But not something as a contemplative reference on the quintessential insight, that death is the crowning end of life, but as ideas that are characteristics of life, the human existence: that time which dissolves itself in the present ceases to be living time at all.

Liberated through the flowing loss of the visible, the inevitable catastrophe of “not understanding” catches hold practically unnoticed. At the same time as this awareness of the “not more understanding” looms an event of future aesthetic proportions,  Yun-Hee Huh’s clearly obvious happiness for the sake of drawing by means of the drawing process. Aesthetic negativity transforms itself into a form salvaged zest for life and shapes a rule against the negative moment through the process of symbolization in which within lives every aesthetic experience of the ever lasting disappear ing “now” event. It is a sudden change in the rhythm of the eternal reappearance, a sudden change in the rhythm of the endlessness, from one quality to the other; repetition of the same as something different.

Drawings in the manner of diary notes underline Yun-Hee Huh’s endeavour to arrange art in life and life in art, by the means of making interrogative sketches how it was day for day and if life has a significance. Thereby she is unrelenting in such a way towards everything of an organized existence, that the expression of her drawings here especially marks the significance of existence. It is probably a big effort to constantly try to pursue the endeavour to concentrate life in a work of art. But I’m sure that Yun-Hee Huh doesn’t pay any heed to the effort but to the force, a force which draws the positivism of life out of the aesthetic negativism, and with it brings forth conciliatory solace.