Replaying the World
Martine Dancer
« Nous avons besoin pour survivre de l’éventail au complet de nos sentiments. Car des millions de sentiments […] sont à connaitre, sont à éprouver. » — Francis Ponge¹
Born in Seoul, Meeno Yoon, who has been living in France for several years, subtly blends Eastern and Western traditions. While she has reappropriated a traditional Korean medium, she expresses herself with ease and mastery within the specific movement of Western pictorial writing.
She often lingers on and revisits the iconic mythic figure of Ophelia, the tragic heroine celebrated by the Romantics following Shakespeare’s drama. Seen as representative of the late 19th-century fin-de-siècle period, the solitary figure, lost in reverie, portrayed by writers like George Sand, Alfred de Musset, or Victor Hugo, dominated many theatrical, musical, and literary works of the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist movements.
Meeno Yoon first became interested in depicting the young drowned woman through small-format drawings of women’s bodies, floating on the white page, in an always ineffable universe, appearing through a few strands of colour, their faces often expressing pain. During the long stretch of time during France’s lockdown, Meeno Yoon devoted herself to studying John William Waterhouse’s² Hylas and the Nymphs. Confirming her fascination with themes dear to the Symbolists, she humbly engaged in “learning by observing the transcription of a personal vision of the masterpiece.³”
Ophelia reappears recurrently in several series of her works. As her exploration of this subject deepens, with broad colourful strokes, violence takes precedence over the mastery of colour through line. This attraction of Meeno Yoon to Symbolism becomes clear. She resonates with what Jean Clair noted in Éloge du visible: “In the economy of the Symbolist psyche, the self and its celebration remain undoubtedly the core of the creative phenomenon. This movement opened itself to what Carus, a physician and artist himself, attests in his book Psyche—the key to the knowledge of the conscious soul lies in the unconscious.⁴”
For Meeno Yoon, the questioning of what drives the appearance of certain recurring themes in her work has continued and intensified, but in a more realistic manner as it is resolutely linked to her search for “lost time⁵”. This has led to a more appropriate technique for handling her canvases without resorting to symbolism, in an inner quest to grasp the multiplicity of what has shaped her identity. Her journey led her to delve into family photo albums, reactivating buried memories, which she then transposed onto canvas. These works narrate her attempts to rediscover that childhood tranquility preceding the learning of societal rites, that serenity which gradually weaves the protective cocoon—essential for facing life’s challenges—while also conveying her quest for identity. The maintenance of a very specific form of censorship tied to her native country initially hindered her pictorial practice.
Meeno Yoon reflected deeply on the Korean specificity she mentioned in an interview: “There would be a narcissistic dimension to painting my own face through family memory; this thought likely originates from my culture, which prioritises the group over the individual. Focusing on oneself is inappropriate.⁶” She freed herself from this by painting scenes that bear witness to her childhood. This offered her more freedom later on to revisit the aforementioned subjects that are more crucial to her, such as those of sexuality and the female condition. As a result, she returned to that strange series of women floating in space or in an aquatic universe, depicted on the white page that contracts after the soft brushstrokes carrying arbitrary colours. Reminiscent of the Ophelia theme, some of these works reveal a certain suffering. Other female bodies mysteriously emerge from peony buds or flower cups. This flower, with its soothing medicinal qualities—according to multiple superstitious beliefs reported by Theophrastus⁷—can be associated with the phoenix, embody an archetypal figure of the soul, or reveal the orientation of psychic tendencies through its colour.
For her taut or free canvases, Meeno Yoon has spent a long time experimenting with the qualities and reactions of acrylic paint on a very particular support; she has methodically explored the multiple potentialities of Hanji, a paper still handmade in Korea from mulberry pulp, which she sometimes mounts on canvas. She visited several workshops still specialising in this craft to meet the papermakers and learn more about its properties.
With collages of exotic paper fibres, she animates her surfaces in a very distinctive way. In this demanding existential quest, the respect for fine craftsmanship is marked with a great authenticity. Avoiding approximations, she imposes on herself the mastery of traditional knowledge essential to her work. Her approach does not involve literal appropriations nor updated transcriptions of past works.
Thus, Meeno Yoon draws from the multiple knowledges of those who preceded her, mastering them to make them her own, to recreate the world, to recreate her world.
1. Francis Ponge, Complete Works, Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1999, p. 202.
2. John William Waterhouse (Rome 1847 – London 1917), British Pre-Raphaelite painter, Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, Manchester Art Gallery.
3. Vincent Gobber, Peonies Time, text for Meeno Yoon’s exhibition at Philippe Durand, Summer 2022.
4. Jean Clair, Praise of the Visible: Imaginary Foundations of Science, nrf, Gallimard, Paris, 1996, p. 86.
5. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927.
6. Martine Dancer, Interview with Meeno Yoon, March 2023.
7. Theophrastus, Greek philosopher (372–288 BC), naturalist, founder of botany.
Peonies Time
Vincent Gobber
In 2020, Meeno Yoon made a study of Hylas and the Nymphs¹ by the British and Italian painter John William Waterhouse. Although the artist claims the artistic influence² of her native South Korea, her upbringing in a family of great artists gave her early access to Western culture. The choice to study a painting from a European movement is no accident. In the tradition of 19th century artists, it was an apprenticeship through the eye, the transcription of a personal vision of the masterpiece. The encounter, fatal for Hylas, takes place in a nature oscillating between green, ochre and sulphur shades. While drawing water, the Argonaut Hylas³ is tacken by nymphs seduced by his beauty and disappears forever. In the body of water, the naiads and the aquatic plants are one. They merge into an open surface against a threatening background – as Bachelard so aptly put it, “still waters that incite melancholy and death⁴.”
The series Ophelia in the Swimming Pool, paintings and watercolours of the female nude, explore recurring themes with the artist. Here, the body is isolated, floating in the texture of paper fibres: “a kind of very striking halo of emptiness that gives the mind the little vertigo of infinity⁵,” wrote one art critic of Odilon Redon’s bouquets of flowers. What does this solitude arouse? Is it a reverie, a sad meditation, a passion? The ambivalence remains. Ophelia⁶ is the drowned wife of Prince Hamlet in the tragedy. This theme has haunted Western painting in previous centuries. Here, the fragility of the paper⁷ sometimes wrinkled by the watercolour—a technique that overflows predefined forms—accompanies the introspection. The slight imbalance of the composition joins an intimacy imbued with spirituality and a sensuality inspired by the nude drawings of Rodin or Schiele.
In a recent series, Meeno Yoon practices a classic Korean painting technique of mineral pigments and collage on Hanji⁸. The bouquet of peonies is the central motif in compositions that recall an age dominated by the sacred. Drenched in lush surfaces, transparencies and sometimes vivid, dense hues, some bouquets are akin to the Christian iconic tradition. Geometric shapes overflow the frame, delimiting the central figure and introducing a tension that brings them closer to the pictorial research of the artist Francis Bacon, which the artist has questioned at length. The titles borrow from the symbolism of the representation of the sacred and from the stylistic vocabulary of 18th and 19th century Western painting, elements that are conducive to the narrative: red background, broken vase, black flower, octopus roots, evanescent light. They are a positive reflection of the series’ subtitle. Thus, through the figuration of a floral motif, the artist raises identity and social claims related to the female condition.
Meeno Yoon’s works are apparently spontaneous, but they invite the public to take the time to look. They incite meditation in the tradition of 17th century Northern European still lifes, and through this we are able to understand their complexity. The syncretism of a mixture of contributions from different cultures appears in the background, an observation of the history of relations to oneself and to others.
1. Oil on canvas, 1896, by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917).
2. See his studies of the grape paintings of the Korean painter and poet Sin Saimdang (1504/1551).
3. Character from Greek mythology, favourite of Heracles, son of Theiodamas, king of the Dryopes, and the nymph Menodice.
4. Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves: essai sur l’imagination de la matière, 1942
5. Marius-Ary Leblond, “Odilon Redon. Le merveilleux dans la peinture”, 1907
6. Ophelia a character in the tragedy Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, published in 1603.
7. The lightness of the paper is no longer as noticeable in the works presented, which have recently been mounted on paper.
8. Hanji is the traditional Korean paper.