Seung Ho Yoo
Ung-Ung
2020

About the Item

About ‘Ung-Ung’ Ung-Ung is an onomatopoeic word for weeping loudly in Korean(엉엉). By repeating the letter under the boldly written 엉엉, the painting looks as if the word itself is shedding tears. About Seungho YOO’s Work His works can be reviewed and classified in a few typical styles. The first style comes from the series using characters that helped make his work widely known. His character work represents images and situations by using words and sentences. This series can be divided into two styles: one exploits a play on words like a childish pun by children or comedians and the other appropriates both Eastern and Western masterpieces, especially Oriental landscape painting that is quite familiar to us. His work employing a play on words usually makes use of onomatopoeic and mimetic words and appropriations of foreign words’ pronunciations. This work is visually and semantically lighthearted and nimble due to the mixture of meanings characters retains and the twisted use of their associations with images. Excerpt from ‘Childishly and Splendidly Frolicking’ by Seung oh SHIN, Director at Perigee Gallery (Foreword from the exhibition ‘Shaking your hair loose’ catalogue, 2015, Perigee Gallery) ARTIST STATEMENT My work focuses on the relationship between ‘Writing and Drawing’. From a distance, it appears to be a drawn image but a closer look reveals innumerable minute handwriting strewn over. Therefore, my work is comprised of tiny texts but seen as an image as well. I began to create ‘Text painting’ due to the fascination with blurry brush strokes of Ink wash painting, i.e. smudged contours of Chinese ink on mulberry paper. Such interest towards blurredness has expanded to dismantling the borders between traditional oriental painting and scribble, brush and pencil, and uniqueness and reduplication. ‘Text painting’ is often composed of onomatopoeic or mimetic words. Piles of tiny texts such as ‘Shoo Shoo Shoo-(슈슈슈-)1’, ‘Eng Eng Eng Eng~(앵앵앵앵~)2’, ‘Ung~Ung(엉~엉)3’, ‘Ya~ho(야~호)4’, ‘Woo Soo Soo Soo(우수수수)5’, ‘Joo roo roo rook(주루루룩)6’, and ‘Ung-geum Ung-geum(엉금엉금)7’ together form into an image. ‘Echowords’, a term that refers to ‘imitating language’, represents my work. 1. Sound of wind, wave, or flying 2. Buzzing 3. Crying loudly 4. Yahoo 5. Rustling down 6. Sound of falling rain 7. Crawling

Creator:

Seung Ho Yoo (1974, Korean)

Creation Year:

2020

Dimensions:

Height: 16.15 in (41 cm)Width: 11.7 in (29.7 cm)

Medium:

Paper,Ink

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2010-