Art Critic Yoo Hyun-joo

Trees with Trees

If one were to describe the artist Huh Yun-hee in symbolic terms, she would be an artist who draws trees with trees. “Trees with trees,” the words that describe the artist, suggest that because her favored medium—charcoal—is made by burning wood, she can render a subject from nature using something drawn from nature itself, with a palpable sense of direct connection to it. However, Huh Yun-hee’s representation of nature is not in harmony with humanity, but rather appears wounded by it. In other words, the protagonists of her paintings include vanishing forests and rapidly melting glaciers, as well as endangered species—rendered as self-portraits—each bearing the scars of reckless development and climate change. By drawing trees with trees, the artist seeks to console nature and prays that humanity and nature might embrace one another. In Huh Yun-hee’s art—where nature speaks through nature—we glimpse the shadow of ecological contemplation, which urges reflection on the interconnectedness of all living things and on modern civilization as the source of dissonance between nature and humanity.

Her mural practice dates back to her time studying in Germany. Disappearing (2020), exhibited at Art Space Sueño 339, and Glaciers are Melting (2021), presented in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s exhibition Catastrophe and Recovery, are works that clearly foreground ecological themes. In the Catastrophe and Recovery exhibition, Huh Yun-hee presented a performance of “drawing and erasing” with charcoal, depicting a melting glacier and an endangered pungnan(wind orchid) perched atop it. The artist refers to this act of erasure as “another beginning”—that is, an act of birth. She describes drawing and erasing as “a kind of samsara—like life being born, growing, disappearing, and being born again, while erasing and drawing again, continually moving forward.” Huh also emphasizes the Buddhist notion of “here and now” through her charcoal wall drawings, which exist only for the duration of the exhibition, stating that “nothing is eternal.” In this context, the artist appears to reference a form of Buddhist eco-philosophy that emphasizes relationality with all beings in the present world. The Buddhist philosophy she engages with relates to the worldview of Indra’s Net—a vision of the universe in which each jewel, threaded at every knot of the net, reflects all others. It embodies the principle of dependent origination, where all things arise through mutual relationship and nothing exists in isolation.

Indra’s Net is an ontological concept in which all life—from humans to microbes—is interconnected and mutually dependent. The idea that every cell of every living organism forms a vast network, and that Gaia, the Earth itself, is an organic system of interconnection, is not only central to the worldview of Indra’s Net, but also foundational to Western ecological thought. Whatever philosophical framework Huh Yun-hee may hold, it is clear that she feels a deep sense of mourning over the ailing condition of the Earth and the disappearance of living beings. In fact, in The Disappearing Face (2020), the artist presented portraits of endangered plant species native to Korea and carried out a mourning performance in which she called out the names of 276 endangered species together with the audience. When Huh Yun-hee delicately observes endangered plants and paints their blossoms as if they were memorial portraits, the flowers she renders are not merely beautiful still-life subjects—they appear, above all, as members of Earth’s fragile family most in need of comfort: oikos.

Huh Yun-hee’s mural projects addressing ecological issues are mostly spontaneous and one-time acts of “drawing and erasing.” Her process of spending long hours drawing murals only to later erase them with equal care echoes, in part, the context of late-20th-century artists who began responding to environmental issues by rejecting artificial transformation of materials and instead exploring ways to use and exhibit substances within natural cycles. This act of erasure also aligns with the current of ecological art that sought to resist the capitalist logic of ownership and accumulation. Artists engaged in ecological practices often presented works that were difficult to commodify within the art market. For example, they used the earth as canvas to build stonemounds (Robert Smithson), planted trees in landfills (Mel Chin), purified polluted water inside museums (Hans Haacke), or cleaned the floors of city buildings (Mierle Laderman Ukeles). Their works drew attention to the intrinsic value of soil, trees, water, and air, and embraced the ephemeral and the unownable. Huh Yun-hee’s act of erasure can also be seen as a gesture that resists the capitalist notion of ownership. Rather than accumulating surplus commodities in the vaults of capital, ecological works made from materials destined to disappear resonate with the lifestyle of ecologists who envision the simplest of lives.

Life as Art: Diary of Leaves and Sunrise Diary

Examining the trajectory of Huh Yun-hee’s life, her engagement with ecological issues appears almost inevitable. It was only after returning from her studies in Germany (1995–2004) that she began to place environmental issues at the center of her practice. However, a series of events—including her early interest in the works of Henry David Thoreau during her time in Germany, her discovery of the Korean journal Green Review, and the unexpected opportunity to illustrate one of its covers—prompted her to begin approaching the environment through an ecological lens in her work. In 2023, burned out from life in the big city, the artist left Seoul for Jeju Island in search of rest for her weary body and mind. There, she continues to find deep solace in the natural world, carrying forward her art, grounded in ecological reflection.

Looking further back, it’s clear that a key influence on the nature-oriented direction of Huh Yun-hee’s work was her experience at an art academy in Galan, a rural town near Toulouse in southern France, run by her art philosophy professor Rolf Thiele during her studies in Germany. Spending several summers there participating in land art projects, she built a house, painted, drank tea, and stargazed at night in the name of art—immersing herself in the beauty of nature. At the time, Huh Yun-hee built a structure she called coffin house, a project intended to affirm life at the threshold between death and existence—an embodiment of the Nietzschean spirit of Amor Fati. If Amor Fati is indeed one of the guiding forces in her life, then the vitality and warmth of the natural world she experienced in southern France—enduring barren winters only to bloom unfailingly again—must have taken root as the germ of her ecological reflection in art.

Rooted in her deep longing for a life attuned to nature, Huh Yun-hee’s Diary of Leaves (2008–2020) was inspired by David Thoreau’s idea—described in Autumnal Tints—of a picture book made of autumn leaves. What Thoreau left unrealized, Huh Yun-hee hoped to fulfill herself. She has described Walden as the single most meaningful book that redirected the course of her life—an indication of just how deeply her art is shaped by Thoreau’s ecological philosophy. A critic of 19th-century American materialism, Thoreau wrote in Walden that he chose life in the woods “to live deliberately.” This reflects an ecological way of life—a desire to live as simply as possible, “to front only the essential facts of life.” It was also an act of civil resistance—Thoreau’s retreat into the woods served as a protest against unjust laws and government authority. The reflections Huh Yun-hee recorded in Diary of Leaves on global events, both large and small, represent her own version of Thoreau’s critique of civilization. These include sorrow and concern over lives sacrificed to radioactive rain and human greed (April 7, 2011), the development of nuclear power (March 26, 2011), anxiety about the world’s endless wars sparked by watching the U.S. launch missiles into Syria (April 10, 2017), and grief over the vanishing sound of birds due to environmental destruction (August 3, 2008). Through Diary of Leaves, which captures the vivid beauty and wide variety of leaves—so striking they eclipse the bleak landscape of our time—Huh Yun-hee opens up her own version of Walden.

Originally a painter by training, Huh Yun-hee has consistently sought to experiment with and expand the boundaries of painting—from autobiographical narrative works to performances that express her love of nature and concern over ecological crises, to the practice of diary-based art. These artistic practices convey a sense that Huh Yun-hee’s paintings are not confined to the white cube. Her artistic actions have been likened to those of social sculptor Joseph Beuys, who reframed acts like tree planting and public lectures as art—his own practice of life as art. In this context, Huh Yun-hee’s diary-based art—composed of drawing and text—may well be regarded as a form of life as art, developed in conscious rhythm with the seasons. The Sunrise Diary series, begun in Jeju in October 2023, is another example of a practice in which life and art are inseparable. Each day, she returns to the same spot to observe the sun and paint the day’s sunrise then and there. As she paints sunrises that are repeated yet never the same, she writes down her thoughts for the day. In one entry, she reflects on her artistic process, caught between the canvas and the rising sun.

“Each day, I paint a new sky, a new picture. Even when the paintings appear unchanged, could they be making bold strides forward? Even while working from life, can I still create a painting that’s true to who I am? As I paint the sunrise, I slip away—does anything of me remain? What does it mean for something to be mine? What is it, after all, that I truly want to paint?”

(#109, April 8, 2024)

In front of a blank canvas, always beginning anew, the artist turns inward to ask what defines an art that is true to herself. Interweaving the transience of human life, the ever-shifting rhythms of nature, and her own existential questions as a painter, Huh Yun-hee’s Sunrise Diary is undoubtedly a form of life-as-art that records both the artist’s time and nature’s time.

Body Drawings in Resonance with Nature

What captivates us in Huh Yun-hee’s works—drawings made from nature to depict nature—is the rhizomatic proliferation of forms in which bodies of nature and humans, animals and plants, grow and extend in diverse directions. A mountain shaped like the feet of a prone figure (Destroyed Feet, 2012); a giant bird fluttering feathers that resemble tree branches (Bird-Beyond the Boundary, 2017); a tree standing as if pressing against the earth with sinews—or bones—of a human body (Tree, 2013); a tree covering its face with an enormous hand (Starry Night, 2007)—in these paintings, images of nature resemble human organs like hands, faces, feet, tendons, and veins. Sometimes, images of plants are also interwoven with depictions of land and animals. In Huh’s art, all life in the universe—humans included—is connected, entangled, and in mutual resonance. As Lynn Margulis noted, nature has evolved through symbiosis. On mountains stripped bare by logging for shipbuilding and papermaking, soil and fungi nurture pines and mushrooms, which in turn provide sustenance for people—allowing all to continue living together. Nature, in its wisdom, has formed a society of symbiosis—leaning on and cooperating through each other’s bodies.

The anthropologist Tim Ingold’s observation seems apt—that the lines of a forest become crumpled and creased, making boundaries difficult to discern, because they create folds of connection: layers over and under that burrow into and blend with one another in pursuit of coexistence. Interestingly, Huh Yun-hee’s drawings illustrate Tim Ingold’s ideas remarkably well. The bird she draws can become a human face or a tree because her drawings carry a flow of lines that resonate with nature. The freedom in her lines differs from the rigid, sleek, and angular lines of the city that often feel oppressive. Flexible and rich, even sensitive to the most subtle movements, her lines link nature and humanity and reveal the intricate entanglement of diverse things. Here, let us turn to a passage from Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, quoted in Huh Yun-hee’s diary.

“Our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. Even the protoplasm that streams within each cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea. And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb.”

Returning to Huh Yun-hee’s paintings with Carson’s words in mind, one is justified in interpreting all her work as a meditation on the entanglement and interconnectedness of all life that began in the sea. In the author’s view, Huh’s paintings appear to be traces of a life lived in resonance with nature—contemplating, over time, the bonds that link humanity and all living beings. She is, without doubt, a painter in pursuit of a creative life—a descendant of Thoreau, who chronicled his experiments and practices of living freely in defiance of convention and institution.