GALLERY HYUNDAI is pleased to present Yun-Hee Toh’s solo exhibition Night Blossom. Since her last solo show in 2011, the artist traveled between Seoul and Berlin and began to explore a new way of painting, which unfolds through this exhibition of selected works. Each of her new works, akin to the title Night Blossom, is a fruition of artistic distress and investigation that captures “the colors bloom from darkness” and “the world at night unveils.”
One of the most significant distinctions from her prior works is employing the artist’s hands to paint, abandoning her usual materials like pencils and brushes. After realizing how much time-consuming graphite drawings started to deviate from her initial spark of inspiration, Toh eschewed pencils and brushes to use her hands for more direct and accurate artistic expressions. Additionally she began to revisit and exploit colors that have been long repressed from her work. It was her perceptive approach towards her work that compelled her to capture and translate every single fine layer of her artistic impulses and desires onto the surface of the canvas.
Despite the distinctive shift in pictorial form, Toh’s interests in “unfamiliar fragments of life” and “the unrevealed part of the phenomena” have been a constant undercurrent in her oeuvre. Instead of focusing on socially and politically charged issues, Toh always has been connected to intrinsic qualities of individuals in their everyday lives; rather than a direct message on a grand narrative, her paintings are more relative to private confessions of the human existence. The new paintings by the artist are also in the similar vein of context. Though an oxymoron — colors and forms emerge after the light vanishes — they are the fragments of daily lives and the other side of the world that we equally notice. Toh’s paintings posit indirect yet clear questions in regard to these matters.
Born in Seoul in 1961, Toh has consistently endeavored to produce paintings after her first solo show in 1985. Her following exhibitions were held in Galerie Beyeler (Basel, Switzerland), GALLERY HYUNDAI (Seoul, Korea), Kumho Museum (Seoul, Korea), Mongin Art Center (Seoul, Korea), Artemesia Gallery (Chicago, USA), and more. Her works are also collected by distinguished institutions such as National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (Seoul, Korea), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), World Bank (Washington D.C., USA) and Philip Morris Companies Inc. (Richmond, USA).
