Kumgangsan

The mountain massif Kumgangsan is the inspiration for the mural design by Jongsuk Yoon. Kumgangsan ("Diamant Mountain"), which today is located on North Korean territory, commemorates the arbitrary division of North and South Korea in 1945 and as such is a symbol of an unresolved geopolitical conflict and its traumatizing aftermath. Yoon's painterly approach to this place, which she has never visited herself, combines the paradigms of Western Modernism and East Asian traditions, particularly Korean sansuhwa ("Mountain and Water Paintings"), to create an entirely anti-monumental landscape painting. Diaphanous layers of large-scale, repeatedly smudged color patches, processual traces, and graphic ciphers condense to form panoramic "soul landscapes" (J. Yoon), in which "inner" and "outer" perspectives oscillate.