By Richard Vine

Kyung Youl Yoon’s sculptural painting—large panels bearing patterns of small colorful aluminum boxes—have such an aura of cartographic coolness that one might take them for products of pure cerebration. Sight, it seems, has been transformed into thinking about sight—from an aerial perspective. Such a visual method, and such seeming impersonality, we associate with clarity, science, and logic. But that is not the approach Yoon began with or practiced for more than half of his career. And it is not the whole story of his artmaking today.

Like virtually every postwar Korean artist, Yoon grew up with an awareness of traditional art, both courtly and vernacular, but he was soon rocked by encounters with Western modernism. When he went to Spain to study fine arts at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1980, he became enamored of the earthy gestural abstractions of Antoni Tàpies. That highly emotive genre of painting, made famous decades earlier by the Abstract Expressionists in New York, perfectly suited Yoon’s sensibility at the time. Admiring, too, the allusions to nature in the nonrepresentational works of Denmark’s Per Kirkeby, the Korean émigré produced many formally subtle but psychologically intense oil-on-canvas works along with a few highly stylized figurative sculptures.

            Yoon’s 1995 move to the United States, where he settled in New Jersey not far from New York City, seems to have prompted a slow but steady maturation of his thought and vision. No bohemian nomad, Yoon had been married since 1977 and was the father of four daughters. He took various day jobs to support both his family and his artwork. Stability and clarity of purpose had become essential to his being, and they eventually became central to his art as well. In 2012 he began making the signature works of his mature artistic period.

His working method is almost an art in itself. Yoon usually begins by painting his canvases with a background color and multiple vectors (lines that sometimes run parallel for force and speed, sometimes cross to evoke depth). Then with the canvas on the floor, he begins to adhere colored aluminum boxes of various sizes in patterns that are, by turns, foursquare and stately, or geometrically dynamic. The result can resemble a map, growing crystals, a bird’s-eye view of a city, a pixelated computer screen, a microscope slide, or any combination of these and other segmented rectilinear referents. Finally, each work is placed in a transparent display box designed to be hung on a wall when exhibited.

Viewers of this work typically find themselves dazzled at first. The colors are vibrant, the patterns are gorgeous, and the surfaces shimmer. What Yoon calls his “cubic” art literalizes in three dimensions the multi-perspective fragmentation that Cubism suggested in two. But that visual razzle, that fun, soon invites sober consideration of some serious issues. What is human development, specifically urban development, doing to the topography and ecology of the earth? Does the civilizing process, seen from a distance, justify its social effects at ground level? (Yoon challenges us to infer or remember these daily interactions; they are invisible in his work.) Is this course of evolution—discrete buildings that host atomistic individuals—the best possible direction for our race? For other species? We clearly have structure, but do we have meaning?

            Yoon’s is the achieved dispassion of classicism. Like Mondrian he worked his way from realistic depiction through degrees of abstraction to an art that is sparse, reductive, and rectilinear, yet brimming with color and life. His technique includes aspects of collage and even additive sculpture. It thus manifests affinities, in the realm of contemporary Korean art, with Kwang Young Chun’s massive accumulations of folded paper as well as the woven and knotted canvas-strip compositions of Shin Sung Hy. Farther afield, one can find formal links to the Lego pictures recently produced by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and the metal draperies of Ghana’s El Atsui. Like his African peer, Yoon works primarily with salvaged aluminum in part because it is malleable and easy to manipulate, in part because he wants to champion recycling and the spiritual elevation of a common, poor, and much discarded material. Such is the function of art itself.

            We might wonder, though, at the absence of organic forms in Yoon’s imagined world. Are plants and animals too messy in their youthful vitality, too tragic in their slow rotting demise? This omission of the biological reminds us that the modernist revolution was largely one of subtraction. Art was reinvigorated, advocates claim, through a progressive stripping away of superannuated conventions. Imagine a 19th-century history painting produced in the French Academy. It stands before us replete with grandiosely posed naturalistic figures. Its modeling and perspective, both linear and atmospheric, are exact. It tells us a compelling story from history, literature, or myth. It points a moral. . . . And then comes a rush of multiple “-isms” (Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Orphism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dadaism). One movement takes away the illusion of depth, another figuration, another narrative, another rationality, another naturalism, another symbolism, another morality. Finally, we are left with an art that is in itself, of itself, about itself. All modernism, in that sense, is minimalism—with vigor.

            But we are beyond modernism now. Artists all over the world are finding ways to reclaim and recycle what was previously discarded. Yoon, to his credit, has managed to turn the minimalist vocabulary to his own non-minimalist ends. His is an art about beauty and how we place ourselves in the world.

            There is one subtraction, sadly, that cannot be avoided: the one that deletes our consciousness from the world. For a thinking person, which Yoon so clearly is, mortality—or rather awareness of one’s mortality—can induce a wild love for the things of this world. And an artist’s love acts through seeing. The elevated perspective in Yoon’s work, the transcendent view upon a receding earth, bespeaks an intimation of eternity. Death comes gaudily arrayed; the former habitations of the flesh—the towns and villages, the cities and bays, the landscapes and built structures—grow not dim but more insistently, more poignantly vivid. Or so, looking at Yoon’s mindscapes, we can imagine. The world may well gleam brightest in the eyes of a departing spirit, in the soul’s final memories.

Richard Vine is the former managing editor of Art in America and author of such books as New China, New Art and Odd Nerdrum: Paintings, Sketches, and Drawings, as well as the artworld crime novel SoHo Sins.