The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) has opened its largest-ever retrospective of pioneering Korean abstract painter Yoo Young-kuk, titled "Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me," marking the 110th anniversary of his birth. Running through Oct. 25 at SeMA's Seosomun branch, the exhibition brings together 178 works, including 115 oil paintings, drawings, photographs, archival materials, and previously unseen pieces, as well as BTS RM's collection "Mountain." Rather than a chronological format, the show begins in 1964—the year of Yoo's first solo exhibition—and moves backward and forward through time, highlighting his geometric compositions and bold primary colors inspired by the mountains and sea of his hometown Uljin.
This retrospective matters because Yoo Young-kuk (1916-2002) is widely regarded as a forerunner of Korean abstract art, yet he lived a largely secluded life and is less publicly celebrated than contemporaries like Kim Whanki and Lee Jung-seob. The exhibition inaugurates SeMA's new "Korean Modern Masters" series, bringing renewed attention to an artist who developed a distinctive visual language of inner landscapes and rhythmic abstraction. By showcasing his lifelong pursuit of color and nature, the show repositions Yoo as a relentless explorer of color whose work, as curator Yeo Kyung-hwan noted, shocked the art world with its energy and vitality.