Everyday Life, The Language of Communion_ curated by Jeongju Choi
Since late 1990s, by focusing on even the smallest emotions triggered by myriad of quotidian events he encountered, Yoo Geun-Taek translated the ideality of East Asian ink painting into a language based on reality. For him, ‘everyday life’ functions as a space for daily living as well as a language and an apparatus mediating between life and art. By depicting the objects that he investigated and interacted with in his real life, Yoo Geun-Taek reproduces all the emotions he experienced in his works. Temporality and spatiality, fused with a certain atmosphere, transform into singular energy. In his works, ephemeral instants build up to a scene that tells countless epic narratives and, at the same time, acquires eternal quality.
Yoo Geun-Taek picked up and refined his pictorial language after negotiating his way through the influential discourse of the Minjung movement in the 1980s. Witnessing the flow of the Minjung movement, he assimilated responsible consciousness for history and peoples. Yoo, however, realized that the substantial significance of historical consciousness manifest itself only in the accumulation of the tangible reality and ever since concentrated on the ‘here’ and ‘now’ in ‘everyday.’
