Byline: Lane Barden

Yunhee Min’s work at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects last summer follows an earlier body of work similar in style, “Movements” at her New York gallery in 2016. Both of them mark a strong new direction for her painting. The new series, entitled the “Wilde Paintings,” is so named because the generous natural light in her new DTLA studio—located on a street in the fashion district named for Oscar Wilde—served as inspiration for the work.

The statement accompanying the exhibition quotes Wilde: “Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood.” This quote was not to be taken seriously—for Min, the light in her studio was as important as the acoustics would have been for a sound recording; it affected the character of the paintings and established a mood for their development. Yet the paintings themselves take us beyond mood into a potent pictorial space, where color, light and painting constitute a stronger force.

Min’s new paintings, like the earlier Movements paintings, draw the viewer into them with an ease emanating from her method—broad, bold, thinly applied swaths of rich color, each bearing a clear singularity while delicately blending and mingling with their neighboring color. There is an enigmatic balance to the paintings between a light delicacy of application, and a powerful length and velocity to the strokes—evidence of a greater effort.

The salient quality that emerges is a pure display of color that is vivid and striking—as large as the body of the viewer—standing alone as the painting’s statement while softening the effort that it might have taken to get there. The parallel striations and modulations of the paint strokes record, like a seismograph, the hand of the artist and the feel of the act of painting them, yet there is an effortless quality to the result. The presence of the artist is transmuted into the stroke but screened into the background, embedded in the work like DNA.

 

Her palette is a mixture of airy pastels, occasional strokes of Day-Glo, touches of intensely warm or intensely cool mid-tone colors and a few darker grayish muted shades that anchor the others. The paintings are made with a squeegee so there is a quietly smooth uniformity in them that calms the paint and frees up the colors to act with a purer aesthetic power.
The visual force of these paintings is considerable. I find that when I stand in front of them, close enough to fill my visual field, the color was the form, the content and the message—a cogent statement about the freedom that painting has to jettison everything except the most direct, essential thing.

The work is reminiscent of the early abstract expressionist work of Morris Louis, who poured paint and let it flow down the canvas in bands of color from an older more muted palette. Lest we forget, it was these paintings of Louis along with the more graphic work of Kenneth Noland that served as a starting point in 1960 for Clement Greenberg’s formalist discourse on the flatness of the picture plane, taking Abstract Expressionism to the next logical step by examining the intrinsic nature of color field painting. What was missing from the discourse on abstraction, Greenberg asserted, was awareness of the flatness of the canvas picture plane, a blind spot that Greenberg asserted dated all the way back to the Renaissance.

This claim was thinly supported with a teleological assessment of Renaissance painting as having naively hidden this flatness in Archimedean illusion by inviting the viewer into a vertical, naturalistic space imitating life—thus obfuscating the painting’s flatness.

It took the great iconoclast, critic and expert on Renaissance painting Leo Steinberg to restore some balance to this heady conversation by pointing out that it is absurd to think that Rembrandt was naïve about the nature of painting. Steinberg shifted the argument from Greenberg’s rigid formalist theory about flatness of the picture plane to a fresher perspective drawn from his actual experience in front of a painting when he wrote in his seminal essay “Other Criteria.”

What I have in mind is the psychic address of the image—its special mode of imaginative confrontation and I tend to regard the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture.

That abstract painting could affect the psyche of the viewer, or confront the viewer with the power of the imagination by self-referencing culture, art and painting itself was a profound discovery for modern art and continues to resonate nearly 60 years later.

It is this “special mode of imaginative confrontation” in Min’s work that impressed me because of its phenomenological impact, it also seems to represent a return to the studio where painters have to battle it out with their own instincts and subjective choices rather than farm out their choices and decisions to conceptual strategies. I wanted to know more about how she got there, and how she makes it look so easy, so I decided to pay her a visit.

I met Min at her spacious sky-lit studio on Wilde Street and the light there was as luminous as promised. We sat across from each other at a long table and talked about art and her work. Slender, calm and alert, dressed in work clothes, she projects the same quiet intelligence as her painting. I wanted to know about her method and how she arrived at this plunge into subjective color.

Her earlier work around 2004 followed a conceptual model in which she used only colors of house paints that had been left behind, rejected at the paint store. She was interested in how these colors had been selected by rejection, processed by a cultural filter, and how these socially rejected colors could be transformed by craft—building up layers, sanding, smoothing, blending.

Around 2008 her work began to undergo a fundamental change. She became interested in composition and the possibilities of the picture, and began to feel the need to have a more direct relationship with color and painting. Curious about how she chooses her colors, I asked her about color theory, that of Josef Albers for example. “I think everything we know about color, you just absorb that and it becomes intuitive knowledge,” she said. “Ultimately I don’t know if [my color choices] make any sense in terms of ideas we already have. It’s simply you are looking at a moment when these colors are together in this way and it has its own internal relationships, and it simply exists.” Min paints in the moment when the colors simply exist in front of her, external to knowledge and memory, and she responds to this imprint completely absorbed in the present.

I asked her what it takes to get one of these paintings done, and how she goes about it.

She replied, “I’ve been using squeegees for several years now. You can get them in different grades of rubber, soft or hard, and the ones I like are softer. Also you can get them with different nibs, some are rounded, some are pointed, to give different kinds of effects.”

Though shown vertically, the paintings are created horizontally with the stretched linen laid out on a table so she can pour the paint, then pull it along the linen with the squeegee as she walks from one end of the piece to the other.

Her physical reach and her ability to maintain control—but not too much control—determine the size of her work. This unknown territory between control and unpredictability assure that the results are always a surprise. She works on multiple pieces at one time, moving from one to the other as each piece develops and suggests the next step toward completion.

This is the part that is not as easy as it might appear; it is a process not without angst, internal dialogue, the balancing of considerations, the fear of failure. It’s a winnowing process where she has to leave the work and come back to it, always searching and hoping for what she calls a “little glimpse of freshness.” “It’s exhausting,” she laughed. I pointed out that despite what she went through to get the work done, none of the agony she described seemed to show up in the work. It looks effortless.

Much of the time we spent talking in her studio consisted of me, awkwardly and not entirely coherently, probing her with circuitous questions about subjectivity and painting to see if I could find out what was the basic impulse behind this work. Finally she said this: “The idea of just being able to stand in front of a painting, and just to look at something that is not moving—it’s not doing some fancy trick in front of your eyes, just paint on canvas—seemed radical, seemed important.”

David Salle, in a recent, quite remarkable essay on the work of Terry Winters wrote: “One measure of good artists is that what they do looks easy—once they have done it… [and] we begin to believe—both the manually inclined and those who have never picked up a piece of charcoal—that we could do it too. Alas, most of us cannot.” This would apply to Min’s work as well, but I would tend to agree with Min. I don’t need to know I can do this; standing in front of the painting is quite enough.

So much about the Los Angeles River is not immediately obvious. That it’s a river at all, for example, still comes as a surprise to some. Others wonder when it will ever get the help it needs to really look like a river. The natural river was at least 80 percent ground water. Now there’s no groundwater to speak of, and the river we have is mostly recycled sewage—surprisingly clean tertiary treatment plant water running down a straight concrete shell. There’s simply not enough available real estate to free it from the channel and let it wander like a river would, and no matter how right we are that it is a river, it will remain provisional and abstract in the way it represents itself. What is strange is how attractive it can be once you get to know it—like an oddly cantankerous family member who manages, against all odds, to garner affection.

Okay, affection is not quite the word. But what word would adequately explain the force behind poet Lewis MacAdams’ impossibly successful 30-year effort to fix it, by first cutting a hole in a chain-link fence? What would explain the tall, thin, bald, shaven couple Osseus Labyrint, who suspended themselves naked from cables under the First Street Bridge, or the New Zealand artist Brett Goldstone who built quasi-legal river powered turbines in the channel?

There was the young Dane, now better known as Olafur Eliasson, who, back in ’99, dumped half a shoebox full of intense but harmless dye in the river to turn it a sweeping, shocking bright green. (He said no one noticed). And I cannot explain even to myself, the two or three years of energy and professional capital I spent trying to convince anyone who would listen, that what we needed was a computer operated inflatable dam in the channel to make a seasonal waterway for performance barges and a floating beer garden. There are countless other art stories, far too many to mention here.

On June 29, 2016 the City Council voted unanimously to adapt the environmental impact study for Alternative 20—the ambitious proposal introduced exactly 10 years ago to restore 11 miles of the Los Angeles River. It was the final act before the planning and initiation of actual changes could begin. It was a huge victory for Lewis MacAdams’ Friends of the Los Angeles River, the city, and the environment.

But it would be inaccurate to describe this achievement as a purely environmental and political one. Lewis conceived of it from the beginning as a “40 year artwork.” He has consistently and patiently made a place for artists within it every step of the way. Developers, politicians and environmentalists were included along with everyone else.

The uncomfortable irony is that FoLar’s remarkable success will convert this raw, renegade no-mans’ land, a place for dreamers, misfits and artists, into prime real estate with a generous helping of luxury condominiums. With this in mind, the vast, surreal theater of concrete in the channel through downtown is beginning to look historical and iconic, like something that cannot be surpassed by a contoured landscape, carefully planned with turf, trees, and comfortable venues.

What to make of this massive concrete artifact that drew so many into it and into action? In the study of dynamic systems, a strange attractor is a complicated initial condition that orders and patterns everything that follows in an otherwise chaotic and unpredictable way, while it creates mathematical vectors that render beautifully strange abstractions. I know nothing about chaos theory or fractal geometry, but I know from experience that this sounds a lot like the LA River and the massive effort it took to get this done.

Chaos and unpredictability were woven into it like an intricate conduit of water, birds, fish, artists, flood control, power relations, river denial, legal wranglings, environmentalists, community objections and support, railroads, endless meetings, high tension wires, engineering, history, and an unending flow of dialogue about a river so implacably constrained and concretized, that to have now come to a deep breath of freedom and a turning point can only be described as a miracle. The struggle to draw the river back into its rightful place in the world is over. For better and for worse, let the restoration begin.