Dongkoo Yun’s ‘Artsonje Museum Project’
  2004. 8. 21 - 2005. 2. 6

Artsonje Museum is a private contemporary art museum devoted to the collecting and exhibition of renowned contemporary artists’ works from 1950s onward. As a way to keep the balance with the activities of its young counterpart, Artsonje Center solely focuses on emerging artists, Artsonje Museum has held exhibitions of Korean avant-garde masters whose vision foretells the artistic and cultural trends of today.

For a special exhibition in 2004, Artsonje Museum is pleased to invite Dongkoo Yun, who has shown his unique combination of deep spirituality and dynamic structure in his artistic career of more than three decades. Educated at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s majoring in sculpture, Yun is an artist who has not only a keen sense of form and proportion but also grand vision encompassing the two-dimensional and three-dimensional form. Since the early stages of Yun’s work that incorporated his own blood, gold foil, and sand, he has pursued the field of installation in which he builds a structure of architectural scale with construction materials. In spite of practical concerns and tough labors involved, his installation work in its final state exudes lucid order and religious ambience similar to what we experience inside Seokgulam Grotto. It is interesting to note, however, that passing his project at Sarubia in 1999, his recent installations began to unfold in such a way as to allow flexible, free and open composition. Yun enjoys the process where his initial impression of a given space evolves, and finally transforms through every conceivable experimental iteration at the site. Yun’s style of creation reflects his lifelong interest in observing a productive cycle of a being from its birth to death, and meditating on ultimate state of transcendence, which is implied in the entire bodies of his work.
The ancient capital of Gyeongju with 1,000 years of history was a focal attraction to Yun. Gyeongju offers a peculiar sight in that it houses a royal graveyard in its central district. Another peculiarity about the city is the sight of a large rice field surrounding a sophisticated local resort area. The past and the present mysteriously coexist side by side in Gyeongju. The air of the past and the rush of daily life get along in natural and peaceful way there. Stepping into Gyeongju, most Koreans feel their energy get boosted by long tradition and its cultural legacy. Yun could not find a better subject for his project than this particular place, because this site is even more complex by its double irony that it is a contemporary art museum secured in a tourist area, to borrow his expression, itself “floating like a mysterious island.”

Dongkoo Yun’s ‘Artsonje Museum Project’ is composed of three parts, the museum fa?ade, a central hall and the second floor of the interior. Standing as an independent installation in itself, each of the three sections is integral to a coherent whole that strongly reflects an old cathedral. At the climax of the whole project, there is Jungmiso, upside down. The artist discovered an abandoned Jungmiso, broke apart its structure and the machinery inside, moved them to the Museum and reassembled them into its original shape. On the 2nd floor, an inaccessible hollow corridor runs through a long axis of the space and we can meander through various dynamic elements like vague sunlight, shining light flakes, huge bamboo cones, waving walls, squeaking pulleys, and the shrill sound of cicadas.

Jungmiso, a rice mill that thrashes grains of rice, used to be a familiar sight in the countryside in the 70s. Rice is a fundamental energy source to Koreans, and cooked rice, Bap in Korean, is a basic dish served at almost every meal with various side dishes. But the raw rice, called by a different name, Byeo, should be processed before cooking and turned into Ssal. Jungmiso took the crucial role of processing Byeo into Ssal, as a state ready to become Bap. Later this function was absorbed into an automatic system by the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation, Jungmiso, once one of the most important facilities in Korean culinary culture, has become a historical ruin. The artist cherishes his memory of Jungmiso as a sacred place that changes and “purifies” the coarse rice grain into something we can eat. With a hope to revive its purifying energy, Yun excavates and restores Jungmiso in the city of spiritual pilgrimage.

This project is an accomplishment of the collaborative efforts of professional engineers and technicians, all of whom were under artist’s thorough supervision and the museum staffs’ numerous safety checkups. Artsonje Museum has published a 150 page long semi-retrospective catalogue of Dongkoo Yun containing three critical essays on Yun’s oeuvres with 100 color illustrations.