Korean Modern Masters Exhibition: 《Yoo Youngkuk: Mountains are Within Me》 2026

2026 Korean Modern Masters Exhibition: Yoo Youngkuk: The Mountain is Within Me

To commemorate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Yoo Youngkuk (1916–2002), a pioneer of Korean abstract art, the Seoul Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Yoo Youngkuk Art and Culture Foundation and Chosun Ilbo, presents the largest retrospective to date, 《Yoo Youngkuk: The Mountain is Within Me》. The exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of his artistry through approximately 170 works, including previously undisclosed paintings, reliefs, photographs, drawings, and archives.

In particular, this exhibition is the first project in the newly launched ‘Korean Modern Masters’ series by the Seoul Museum of Art, aiming to reconnect the achievements of Korean modern art from a contemporary perspective. As the first featured artist, Yoo Youngkuk is a creator who lived through the turbulent history of modern Korea—including the Japanese colonial period, the Korean War, and the compressed growth of democracy and the economy—while steadfastly practicing the avant-garde art of abstraction throughout his life and work.

This exhibition comprehensively illuminates Yoo Youngkuk's 60-year career, from his early experiments with abstract art at the Tokyo Bunka Gakuin in 1935 to the imaginative abstraction of his later years. Breaking away from the traditional retrospective format, the exhibition is designed to allow visitors to more engagingly encounter the determination, immersion, and rhythms of the sublime and infinite that Yoo Youngkuk embraced.

Instead, it proposes a unique journey through time that moves backward and then forward, centered around the pivotal year of 1964. Through this approach, visitors can experience a more three-dimensional view of Yoo Youngkuk's artistic world, where he abstracted the 'mountain' using the basic elements of painting: point, line, plane, and color.

The mountains that repeatedly appear in his work are both the actual landscapes and a collective memory of his hometown, Uljin, and simultaneously an internal structure composed of a balance of lines and colors. For him, the mountain was more than an external object of representation; it was a formative essence existing within the mind.

The reason Yoo Youngkuk's work does not merely remain an art-historical achievement of a modern master but resonates deeply with those of us living here and now is that his work allows us to encounter an entire era. At the same time, the order of beauty he constructed continues to lead us toward visual wonder. In an age where digital and AI technologies are shaking the very concept of creation, Yoo Youngkuk's paintings call us back to the fundamental question: what is creation?

In particular, the gaze beyond the infinite implied in his later works demonstrates the possibility of the sublime inherent in the unique medium of painting. Like the vast and deep mountain he discovered for himself, Yoo Youngkuk's work speaks to us today—those of us still searching for our own mountains—with a resilient vitality.

*Audio Guide: Paid audio guide rentals available on-site (Narrators: Son Yeol-eum in Korean, Peter Bint in English) / To be released on the website after the exhibition ends.

Source: Seoul Museum of Art website