Portraits of the World: Korea
Image courtesy of Noelia Veras
By Noelia Veras
To celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2018, the National Portrait Gallery launched an exhibition called Portraits of the World. The exhibit has borrowed important portraits from other countries for one year to highlight portraiture’s diversity from all corners of the world. Currently, a portrait from Korea is being displayed called Mother III by Yun Suknam.
Mother III was created utilizing acrylic on wood in 1993. This is the first time Yun Suknam, a feminist artist from South Korea, has been featured in an American exhibit. She has been featured in over 20 solo exhibits in both Europe and Asia.
The painting was made on wood to bring to life the idea of graceful aging. The wood as a medium reveals the way women’s skin ages and wrinkles in a soft and beautiful way. Yun Suknam utilizes wood in many of her pieces to emphasize the natural process of aging. Additionally, Yun Suknam believes that wood as a medium is a show of strength and resilience, which women intrinsically possess.
“At forty, I decided to live,” said Yun Suknam, according to The National Portrait Gallery Blog.
Yun Suknam decided to become a painter at forty when she realized that her life revolved simply around being a wife and mother. The artist’s solo exhibition in Seoul, Eyes of the Mother, distinguished her as one of the pioneers of feminist art in South Korea. The exhibit reveals Yun Suknam’s desire to see the world through the lens of her mother so as to better comprehend herself.
The painting displayed in the National Portrait Gallery, Mother III, was inspired by the Eyes of the Mother exhibit and expresses a fierce version of Yun Suknam herself. The woman depicted in the portrait is the painter looking directly in front of her. Historically, Korean portraiture reveals women looking down and averting their gaze, but Mother III is different. Yun Suknam continuously creates portraits of women who maintain eye contact and do not avert their gaze as a show of women not being passive and submissive subjects.
Mother III is located in an area filled with other female artists who are from America that explore similar topics of strong femininity and fierce women. This marks a commonality between Yun Suknam and American painters, fulfilling the goal of Portraits of the World in creating a space for international and American artwork to coexist and complement one another.
This exhibit is unique and ever-changing as the painting will soon be replaced on November 17 by another international portrait. Yun Suknam’s portrait is layered, multifaceted, and extremely special because it is the first of the artist’s work to be featured in the United States.
