The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) has opened a major retrospective on Korean abstract artist Yoo Young-kuk titled "A Mountain Within Me" at its Seosomun main branch. The exhibition, marking the 110th anniversary of the artist's birth, is the largest ever mounted on Yoo, featuring 178 works including 115 oil paintings and 15 canvases from the artist's family's private holdings shown publicly for the first time. Curated by Yeo Kyung-hwan, the show defies chronology, beginning in 1964 and moving backward through Yoo's Tokyo years and the lost decade after Korea's liberation, then forward through his geometric abstractions of the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in his late "mind-image abstraction" phase after 1980.
This retrospective is significant as the inaugural exhibition of SeMA's new "Korean Modern Masters" series, which pairs domestic artists with the museum's imported blockbusters like David Hockney and Edward Hopper. The show argues for Yoo's contemporaneity, particularly in his late works where the mountain motif shifts from external subject to internal experience. Museum director Choi Eun-ju and Yoo's son Yoo Jin, president of the Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation, framed the exhibition as a timely meditation on self-reflection and the intrinsic value of human intuition in an age of artificial intelligence and technological disruption.