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THIS
ISSUE
REVIEWS:
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Heewon Chang, Ph. D.
Eastern
University
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Hwa Young Caruso, M. F. A. & John Caruso, Jr., Ph. D.
THE ART
OF SUK NAM YUN:
Introduction
Introduction
Visual images and artworks
play an increasingly important role in a global society. Art
that connects daily life experiences and serves as a social and
cultural critique becomes a vital means of reflecting the nature
of society. Artworks can serve as a sign of resistance to all
forms of oppression including the lower status of women in
society. Their struggle for gender equity is a global issue in
the postmodern period, especially in South Korea where women
have made great gains in education but not in employment,
politics, or any other social institution. [paragraph
1]
Suk Nam Yun is a prominent South Korean female artist and a
founding member of the feminist art movement. Her innovative
artworks raise questions about women's issues and sexist
cultural practices in Korea. She
was born in Manchuria (China) in 1939 during the Japanese
occupation of Korea, and her family returned to Korea when she
was six years old. She currently lives in Seoul, South Korea.
Yun majored in English literature at Sung Kyun Kwan University
in Seoul and later received art training in Korea and America.
She studied at the Pratt Institute Graphic Center and Art
Student League in New York City. Her major medium is mixed
media installation. [paragraph 2]
One
unusual aspect of Yun’s life is that she began her career as a
professional artist at age 40 when many other Korean women are
resigned to family tasks. Yun decided to become an artist to
discover a sense of self and to reconstruct her self-identity.
Yun has dedicated her life to making art, achieving gender
equity, and helping to transform social and cultural practices.
She is fighting against a definition of Korean women as
self-sacrificing beings who live for others while losing their
sense of self. These traditional values, which are based on a
Confucianism patriarchal structure, are taught and reinforced by
Korean cultural practices and social and political structure.
Yun expresses her feminist and political voice through art.
Selected
Artworks of Suk Nam Yun
Mother’s
Eyes Series In 1993, Yun had a solo exhibition entitled “Mother’s Eyes” at the Kumho Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea. The subjects of her art included the life of her mother and Yun’s thoughts as a woman, daughter, and mother. Yun expressed respect, compassion, and deep love for her mother, a widow, who had worked hard to raise six children after losing her husband at age 39. In the artwork entitled “Mother”(1996), which was in the Venice Biennale (Italy), Yun installed 100 burning candles to represent the sacrifices and services Korean mothers make for others. Yun tried to give respect to the family roles of Korean women that are often taken for granted. [paragraph 4]
In traditional Korean culture, the mother is expected to sacrifice herself for the family while maintaining an ambivalent position between her son and daughter. Mothers tend to favor a son over a daughter in the Confucian patriarchal society. Simultaneously, a Korean mother as a woman is oppressed and suppressed by the same cultural practice and social structure she supports. This is a contradictory and problematic practice in Korean culture. In Yun’s installation entitled “Wishing for Son” (1993), she expresses important social and cultural issues including gender discrimination, whereby sons are favored over daughters. Even though it is the twenty-first century, many Korean women are still under pressure to have a son in order to continue the family name and bloodline. [paragraph 5]
In the artwork “Genealogy” (1993), Yun incorporates and emphasizes a family registration book (Jok Bo in Korean), one of the symbols of the male-centered culture and the patriarchal society, which lists only male lines of a family. Yun argues that Korean women have no place, role, and status in the society. She sadly acknowledges the suicidal state of women’s minds and criticizes the patriarchal cultural practices of traditional Korea. Her work expresses the frustration of a Korean woman who cannot continue the family line because she cannot give a birth to a child, more importantly a son. In this situation the husband often takes a concubine to have a son. The husband cannot register the second wife’s name (identity) with honor as a member of his family until he divorces the first wife, even when the second wife produces a son to continue his bloodline and family name. Yet, the son from the second wife ("illegitimate" spouse) is placed in the family book. In “Genealogy,” the seated woman represents the secure position in the family book as dictated by the Confucian social order. The other woman, who cannot "provide" a son, is usually subjected to family pressures and traditional Confucian beliefs, and hangs herself. Through this work Yun criticizes the powerless position of Korean women living under the Confucian patriarchal family structure. [paragraph 6]
Yun’s 1992 installation entitled “Ohujo SookNeuo” (A Lady of Refined Manners) is a portrait of Yun’s mother. It represents her mother who was raised as a middle class woman with refined manners. Her life changed drastically when her husband died. She had to take care of six children by working outside the house, which marked the boundary between a middle or upper class Korean woman and a working class counterpart. A portrait of Yun’s mother represents the noble, strong, and refined manner of traditional Korean women. Motherhood and her mother’s life history were the inspiration of Yun’s artistic expression and became her most significant theme. [paragraph 7]
In most of her mixed media
installations she uses materials including natural wood that
come from scrap pieces of rough logs. She manipulates the wood
by rubbing it to expose its natural grain. She applies
techniques, such as engraving, grinding, carving, and scrubbing,
to create texture within the natural appearance of wood. She
then paints images of Korean women on the wood using acrylics
such as lime green, blue, pink, and black. The pattern that she
paints is based on traditional Korean fabrics such as silken
cloth and Okyangmok (cotton fabric), representing women
who are dressed in the Hanbok (traditional Korean female
dress).
Yun introduced an original
idea of using materials such as mother of pearl, which is used
in typical Korean furniture. She cuts out images in the shapes
of women figures and incorporates Korean cultural motifs and
patterns in her artworks. Her artmaking process involves a
part-to-whole mode of construction. She makes individual parts
that are later assembled into whole structures to convey
representational images and thus creates a narrative of the
artworks. In the accumulative artmaking process she uses the
block-by-block construction principle and a variety of
materials, through which she conveys her artistic intent and
articulates her feminist voice.
Pink Room Series A major series of Yun's artworks deal with women's space at home. The series includes chairs and sofas that symbolically represent Korean women's identity in the contemporary materialistic society. This society emphasizes a shallow life style, which focuses on possessions, beauty, and external appearance rather than self identity, self worth, and gender equity. In the “Pink Room” series Yun recreates a home environment, such as a kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom, that is defined as female space. [paragraph 10]
Yun creates multiple layers of
hidden meanings in these spaces, using various objects such as
chairs, shinning beads, and pink colored walls. The “Pink Room”
(1997) often changes to a disturbing and aggressive place and
implies the unstable energy of hysteria and derangement exuding
from this pink domestic space. Despite the pretty appearance of
the traditional pink silk fabric on the chairs and sofas, which
reminds the viewer of a cozy domestic space, her installations
contain an aggressive message concerned with psychological
tension and instability. There is a collision between the
Korean traditional living space and the contemporary Korean life
style based on rapid economic development, materialism, and
Westernization. One of the salient elements in her artworks is the use of sharp iron spikes installed on chairs and sofas. Their knife-like appearance expresses the fierceness of women, their growth and energy in life. According to Yun, the chair legs are inspired by Eunjangdo, which are the small knives that Korean women used to carry for self-defense during the Choson (Yi) dynasty (1392-1910). The sharp iron spikes are stuck into the seats of the chairs and sofas so no one could sit on them. The spikes mean that no one cannot take the roles of women for granted like an empty seat on which anyone could easily sit. By upholstering chairs and sofas with a pink fabric and fitting them with steel legs, she turns them into personified women. The domestic objects that appear in many of Yun’s installations are symbolic representations of female bodies and contain hidden meanings about the identity, status and roles of women in Korean society. [paragraph 12]
Flower
Shoes Series
Yun’s installation entitled “Flower
Shoes” (1994) reminds the viewer of the traditional Korean art
of embroidery done by women. These typical patterns and
primary-colored objects, such as flower shoes, are considered as
utilitarian handicrafts or folk art. Yun embraces and
incorporates these Korean cultural elements such as patterns,
motifs, and colors into her contemporary artworks. Inside of
the 12 framed boxes, Yun places wooden flower shoes and/or
painted images of shoes, which symbolize the ghostly footprints
of Korean women in society. Each box represents the limited
social space (social status and work opportunity) that they have
under the existing social structure and the belief that women
belong to the private space of home. This work elevates these
flower shoes out of the context of handicrafts and pushes the
viewer to ponder the hidden meaning of each object. Through art, Yun has raised the social, cultural, and feminist consciousness of the viewers and has spoken out for many other Korean women who could not speak for themselves. With great passion, dedication, and positive energy she has made a difference in the lives of Korean women. She gained a national recognition as a leading feminist artist in Korea by speaking out about her beliefs and sharing her political feminist statements through artistic expression. For Yun, art has become a form of feminist political and cultural activism. [paragraph 14] Her cultural, feminist works and artistic achievements are highly valued and recognized by the government and the professional artists community of South Korea. In 1996 Yun was the first woman to receive the Eighth Joong-Sup Lee Award, the highest honor for South Korean artists. In 1997 Yun received “The Prime Minister’s Award” for her contributions to the Korean women’s movement. She is currently the Executive President of the Korean Women’s Cultural Program Association. [paragraph 15] Many of Yun’s artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the following locations: Kamakura Gallery (Tokyo, Japan), Gwangju Biennale 2000 (Gwangju, Korea), Ewha Women's University Museum (Seoul, Korea), The 12th Sydney Biennale (Sydney, Australia), Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth, Australia), National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, Japan), Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Asia Society (New York, U. S. A.), Art Museum of Beijing (Beijing, China), Europa-Ostasien (Stuttgart, Germany), Ho-Am Museum (Seoul, Korea), Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, Canada), and Gallery Velan (Torino, Italy). Her works are in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Kwachun, Korea), Queensland Art Gallery (Brisbane, Australia), Fukuoka Art Museum (Fukuoka, Japan), Mie Prefecture Museum (Mie, Japan), Taipei Fine Art Museum (Taipei, Taiwan), and the Kumho Museum (Seoul, Korea). [paragraph 16] Recommended Citation in the APA Style: Caruso, H.Y.& Caruso, J. (2003). The art of Suk Nam Yun: A feminist expression of Korean women. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education [online], 5(2), 16 paragraphs <Available: http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2003fall/art_reviews.html> [your access year, month date] |
