Yoo Seung-Ho

Tokyo, Mori Art Museum, The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art from East Asia, March - June 2005

Yoo Seung-ho transforms canonized works from Eastern and Western art history into delicate and humorous images by recreating them from tiny accumulations of Hangeul, or Korean script. Yoo’s recreations take on a comical quality that undoes the monumental status of the original works, particularly when they are “read” with the meanings of the onomatopoeic words found in the images. In the present work, what at first resembles a famous Song Dynasty landscape with a mountain and cascading waterfall dissolves into tiny gatherings of the word “shoo.” The artist found the word in a Korean comic book; it refers to the sound of a rocket whizzing into the atmosphere. The landscape is seemingly given the added dimension of sound, as if the image emits a “shoo” as the mountain and water disperse into thousands of tiny words.