Youngsin Ryu is a highly accomplished contemporary painter who for the past five years has focused her attention on representing the formal elegance of birch trees. Like many Korean painters, her point of view is to envision forms in nature that contain the Qi or quiet energy. She discovered the natural movements ofthe trunks, branches, and leaves of these vibrant trees while observing the effect of breezes blowing through the forest glade.
Inspired by what she saw, Youngsin Ryu chose to transform this rhythmic sensation into an epic of wonderment through the art of painting. It is precisely this sense of wonder that intrigued the artist, thus giving the artist a necessary focus by which to concentrate and transform her perceptions of nature through her lingering experience in the birch forest.
Why birch tress? They are strong, yet delicate in their movement. They hold their presence in a way that reveals their special attributes. They are trees that have often been favored by poets, specifically the American poet, Robert Frost, who spoke of birch in his eloquent verse.
There is little doubt that poets in Korea have also found the occasion to mention the birch tree. Because of the innate strength of their branches and their extraordinary flexibility to move with the blithe currents of wind, to go with the movement and then slowly retreat, they hold a symbolic connotation, a sign of liberated strength whereby the mind and body move together in direct counterpoint to one another.
Rather than going against the force of the wind, the birch tree holds its place in time as it moves with its designated space. The Korean ink painters favored this point of view in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries during the Chosen Dynasty, concurrent with the Ming Dynasty in China. The birch tree is the epitome of endurance and well-being.
It is curious that Youngsin Ryu was trained in the Western style of painting, to work with oil paints, as her paintings make clear. While cognizant of indigenous brush painting, she currently favors the use of oil pigments.
Perhaps, this allows her liberation from the ties of the past or at least brings that tradition into a new focus by offering another point of view. Still diligent and resourceful in her approach and in her style and method, Ryu embraces the challenges of finding harmony with these indigenous trees as the primary subject matter of her work.
Ryu has adopted two formidable styles of painting: one includes the realist approach, resembling the rational elements found in both late nineteenth century Impressionism, while the other relies on the irrational use of color made popular by the Fauvists, such as Matisse and Vlaminck, in early twentieth century. Both come from French painting and employ intense levels of color-saturation.
Clearly Ryo has perfected her technique not only in terms of handling the brushwork but also in choosing the colors that maintain an even gradation of light across the surface of her canvases.
The series of Cluster paintings offer a curiosity to the extent that there are two stylistic orientations. The most dominant is what might be called the “hard edge” variations on a theme where the trunks of trees are angular and in the foreground of the composition. But eventually the curvaceous trucks of the earlier Birch Forest paintings from 2011~13 give way to the geometry used in the later Cluster variations.
By the end of 2014, one may discover a glimmer of light in Ryu’s gestural white paintings, also included in the Cluster series, which suggest a transmutation of the angular tree trunk into forms resembling the female body. In that the artist was involved in doing life drawings of female nudes as early as 2008, some of which became acrylic paintings, the transmutation of these trees into abstract female nudes implies the origin of a creative idea.
By late 2014, the oil paintings began looking more like female bodies than birch tree trunks. The notion of expression through sexualized form may suggest the return of the body to its natural origins, which are inextricably bound to nature.
Youngsin Ryu is a superb colorist. This is made evident throughout both series of paintings:her representational Birch Forest series and her titillating abstract Cluster series. Whereas the representational paintings retain a feeling for Impressionism, the Cluster series veer toward Pop Art.
In each case, the color functions differently in relation to form. The color in the Birch Forest series is more modulated with chromatic gradations passing easily from one hue into another. In the Cluster series, the trunk/body shapes are set off against the background as the background is, in effect, pushing forward and equal to the same pictorial status of the angular tree trunks. In this way, the Cluster series resemble the proto-Pop compositions used by the American painter Stuart Davis.
The artist’s use of clearly divided shapes of color in her Cluster seriesis made apparent in a two-panel work from 2013. Here we see five purple trunks speckled in white rising up from a yellow ground over a turquoise streaked red sky. Each shape reveals its own identity as in another Cluster painting where a positive-negative reversal in brilliantly represented in which silhouettes of the sky and the trees replace one another in a Gestalt interaction.
Whereas the negative space is painted in light blue, the positive is painted with dark blue interwoven with fluid orange stripes. Off to the far upper left is s subtle bright red and yellow suggesting a rising or setting winter sun. In either painting, the affect of the color is possibly more related to color in the urban environment, as in Der Blaue Reiter, while suggesting emotional content felt in relation to the forest and the often wild seasonal colors at various times of the year.
With Youngsin Ryu, it takes more than a single glance to absorb the complexity of her paintings. Even in the earlier flower paintings from 2005~2010, the structure of her compositions tends to vacillate between geometric abstraction and organic realism, which suggest both formal precision and emotional content.
Ryu is a prolific painter as her pictorial compositions are open to a myriad of possible variations and permutations. It appears that the recent evolution toward trees as bodies and bodies as trees creates a curious and engaging ambiguity. Indeed, in the most convincing romantic painting _and here I think of Delacroix_ the artist knows how to construct ambiguity in which one thing could be another, and that could be something else. This manner of painting leans most assuredly toward a Modernist aesthetic, which in the work of Youngsin Ryu appears to have found a resonance.
[Robert C. Morgan=Youngsin Ryu: Visual Rhythms from a Forest of Birch, 2014]
◇Robert C. Morgan
Scholar, poet, artist, curator, and critic, Robert C. Morgan writes frequently on the art of contemporary Chinese and Korean artists. He is the New York Editor of Asian Art News and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2005, Dr. Morgan was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in the Republic of Korea.