[Gallery Stroll] Jeongseon's Landscapes Breathe Anew Through Geun-Taek Yoo's Window

Solo Exhibition "Breath" at Gyeomjae Jeongseon Art Museum
106 Works Trace 30 Years of Artistic Practice, Asking What "True-View" Landscape Means Today

Windows are made to look outside. However, in Geuntaek Yoo's work, the window reflects the viewer rather than the landscape itself. The mountains and trees seen beyond the window frame seem like real scenery, but they are also landscapes of memory—appearing to be present reality while, at the same time, embodying inner landscapes. Yoo Geuntaek’s solo exhibition “Breath,” opening at the Gyeomjae Jeongseon Art Museum in Gangseo-gu, Seoul, on August 4, connects three centuries of Korean painting through a single window.

Geun-Taek Yoo, No Other Choice (2002). Objects filling the room and faint figures are scattered like fragments of memory. An early representative work of the artist exploring traces of life and layers of time through everyday scenes. Gyeomjae Jeongseon Art Museum

The exhibition’s title, “Breath,” goes beyond the meaning of life or respiration. It refers to the fleeting moments when a painting and its viewer meet, capturing the rhythm of time where past and present converge. A total of 106 pieces are being presented in this exhibition, ranging from early works dating back to 1995 to new works created this year. Rather than a chronological retrospective of the artist's career, the exhibition is structured and reassembled into a single, unifying breath.

At the center of the exhibition is this year’s newly completed work, “Window.” This piece is newly created based on Jeongseon’s “Cheongha Seong-eup.” The landscapes Jeongseon once painted by traveling through real locations are, in Yoo’s work, no longer merely objective nature. Passing through the boundary of the window frame, the landscape becomes a place that traverses inside and outside, present and past, reality and memory.

At this point, the exhibition naturally prompts a question: What does “true-view” landscape painting (jingyeong sansu) mean today? For Jeongseon, “true-view” meant directly observing and painting actual scenery. But in an era where we often encounter the world first through smartphone screens, how far does “actual” scenery really extend? Yoo Geuntaek does not aim to reproduce landscapes; he paints the very gaze with which we view them. Rather than merely framing nature, the window itself becomes a mode of understanding the world.

Across Yoo’s canvases, water and trees, window frames and interior spaces, light and shadow, continuously intersect. The texture of ink—blurring and blank space—maintains the language of traditional painting while conveying an intensely contemporary sense of space. There is more resonance than explanation, and more silence than depiction. Rather than reading the paintings, viewers find themselves pausing for a moment, synchronizing their breath with the artwork.

This is why the current exhibition is both a Yoo Geuntaek solo show and one that only the Gyeomjae Jeongseon Art Museum could truly create. In a space housing Jeongseon’s works, the act of a contemporary artist inheriting and responding to those landscapes becomes a narrative in itself. The exhibition does not merely preserve tradition but attempts to translate it anew into a living language.

Where Jeongseon once traversed mountains and rivers in search of true-view landscapes, Yoo Geuntaek stands still in front of the window. Although we have moved from an era of walking to an era of looking, a beautiful landscape still holds people for a long time. The “breath” is not inside the painting but is only completed through the breathing of the viewer standing before it. The exhibition runs until October 22.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.