OH YOON 40th Anniversary Special Exhibition

He was born in 1946 in Dongnae, Busan. His father was the novelist Oh Young-su, author of *The Seaside Village*; his mother’s family carried on the Dongnae crane dance. His grandfather Kim Ki-jo was a renowned dancer, and his uncle Kim Hee-young held the designation for the Dongnae crane dance.

The boy who grew up surrounded by literature and dance entered the sculpture department of Seoul National University’s College of Fine Arts. His first step was blocked. In 1969 he founded the Hyeonsil group with Kim Chi-ha and others and declared a realist art movement, but the university and the security authorities stopped the exhibition before it opened.

After graduating in 1970, Oh Yoon went to a factory rather than a studio. At brick kilns in Gyeongju and Ilsan he worked the clay, learning techniques handed down since the Silla era. Those years of shaping earth and cutting stone became his formal language.

For ten years he published no work — a long dormancy that lasted until the founding exhibition of Reality and Utterance in 1980. Of that time he said:

Instead of a single unique work he chose the print, pulled as many times as needed. Each impression widened a path of communication. Art, he held, must not belong to the few.

There was no print market then, and prints were not thought of as commodities. Oh Yoon’s works carry no edition numbers. Rather than raise scarcity by numbering them, he wanted to pull more and give away more. His colleagues remember him laughing over the press: "This is cultural guerrilla warfare."

Oh Yoon's prints never lived only inside gallery frames. When Park No-hae's first poetry collection, The Dawn of Labor, was published by Pulbit in 1984, its original cover was an Oh Yoon woodcut. Thirty years later, when a new edition appeared, major newspapers all recalled that cover — his image had become the face of the book.

Nor was it a one-off commission. The posthumous collected volumes devote an independent chapter to 'book covers,' alongside his prints, oil paintings, and sculpture. Pictures that traveled with books — sold and read together — were a genuine strand of his work.

Cheap to print, bound into books, passed from hand to hand: Oh Yoon's wager that art must be shared was already coming true outside the museum, and younger printmakers carried it on into the print movement of the 1980s. Oh Yoon also left a woodcut of the same title, Dawn of Labor (1984). You can meet it in person in this exhibition.

In 1983 he was diagnosed with cirrhosis. When his health worsened again in the autumn of 1984, he left to convalesce on the island of Jindo.

There he watched funeral processions and encountered the ssitgim-gut, the shamanic rite for the dead. He listened to pansori and yukjabaegi, and learned the drum dance. In a place where death had come close, he learned exhilaration.

After Jindo, dancing bodies pour into his prints. A figure leaping with a blade, a dancing tiger, a drummer, a singer. They were pictures in which joy rises out of sorrow and shadow.

Forty years have passed. In that time Oh Yoon's prints entered the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, their prices soared at auction, and — in the words of critic Yoon Beom-mo — he was recorded in history as "the emblematic artist of the 1980s art movement."

This year, the 40th anniversary of his death, the Seoul Museum of Art's Art Archives has also prepared an exhibition illuminating his work and creative process. Oh Yoon is a name Korean art is reading again. And yet as the records and exhibitions grow, so do the encounters that happen only through reproductions and screens.

A woodcut loses what matters most the moment it becomes reproduction: the depth of the cut, the bite of paper under pressure, the grain of spreading ink.

This exhibition puts back what was lost. Bringing together the prints pulled in his lifetime and the posthumous impressions from his blocks, all 187 of Oh Yoon's prints hang in one room — for the first and last time. On paper rather than on a screen, you meet the era Oh Yoon carved with a knife.

Art must be shared by many, he said. Forty years on, that is also why we are opening this exhibition.