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Portraits of the World: Korea
Yun Suknam , born 1939
Yun Suknam considers herself an "accidental feminist." She launched her art career in 1979, when feminism was all but unknown in Korea. Through portraiture, she hoped to reclaim a sense of self that she felt her marriage and motherhood had erased. She went on to recover the lives of other "lost" Korean women through portraiture, and today Yun is recognized as a pioneer of Korean feminist art.
Two visits to New York City in the 1980s and 1990s helped shape Yun's work. Inspired by artists like Louise Bourgeois and Marisol, she broke free from the flat surfaces of traditional Korean portraiture and embraced the dramatic possibilities of wood assemblage and installation art. She transformed these Western influences by infusing them with Korean cultural motifs, such as patterns derived from traditional fabrics, which she painted with a freedom that reflects her training in calligraphy. Her sensitive use of the wood's grain reflects the influence of historic Korean sculpture.
By highlighting the strength and resilience of Korean women through the ages, Yun's portraits challenge the Confucian ideal of dutiful female self sacrifice. In her words, women "have had to exist beyond history, floating on the surface of water." Her work unearths them "from the dark grave of history and gives them shape." |