Suh Yongsun

Installation View (1)

“Drawing is, at once, an act and an attitude. I believe it to be the most intimate thing that connects to the mind of the artist.” – Suh Yongsun, 2016

Gallery JJ is pleased to present Suh Yongsun: Thinking in Motion, Drawing Danjong, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, focusing on drawings of Danjong within his broader historical work. The exhibition is part of the collaborative project Suh Yongsun: Drawings of Danjong, presented simultaneously across four galleries in Seoul and the Yeongwol Tourist Center Exhibition Hall, each with its own focus, tracing over four decades of his engagement with this subject through drawing since 1986.

Suh Yongsun, Year of the Fowl, Acrylic on paper, 50 × 66cmm, 2006

While Suh is widely known for his intensely expressive paintings with a rich palette, drawing has long been central to his investigation of the human condition. The Danjong drawings, many rarely exhibited or shown for the first time, make this aspect of his practice newly accessible. Despite considerable scholarship on his work, the exhibition’s focus on drawing as method and Danjong as his longest-sustained subject allows a closer engagement with the basis of his practice. It considers how his thinking meets a history both familiar and unfamiliar within pictorial space, and why it remains a vital artistic question today.

Suh Yongsun, King Danjong and Queen Jeongsun, Charcoal water-tinned glue on paper, 24 × 33cm, 1999

Since beginning his practice in the early 1980s, Suh has remained in constant movement, working across the Korean peninsula and beyond, observing and recording as he moves. From the metropolises of Seoul, New York, and Berlin to community sites of Cheoram (2001–), Dokdo (2003–), Garugae Village in Yangpyeong (2020–2021), and Amtaedo (2022–2023), as well as places of historical and cultural memory like Cheongnyeongpo in Yeongwol, he has consistently encountered the conditions of human life with a sketchbook at hand. He approaches history and myth through textual study and site visits, internalizing events and encounters and translating them into drawing. Using whatever materials are available — advertising flyers, wrapping paper — he captures passing impressions and moments of thought, leaving precise traces of his evolving ideas.

Suh Yongsun, The State of Affairs, Pencil, Acrylic on paper, 50 × 66cm, 2006

Recording the atmosphere of the cities he inhabits and retrieving ideas from historical documents and oral accounts, drawing has become for him an instinctive daily practice. His curiosity about the human requires direct engagement with the world, witnessed and experienced through the body; the raw, immediate act of drawing becomes the mode that most fully contains his practice. While all visual art contains drawing, Suh’s work, marked by the dynamic touch of line, is inseparable from it at its core.

Suh Yongsun, 소년왕, Acrylic on paper, 64.5 × 49cm, 2006

Drawing is central to Suh’s practice, the means through which, beginning always from himself, he comes to recognize and record the world, leaving the distinctive traces of his pictorial sensibility. Two published volumes compile his early drawings through 1986; his self-authored booklet Changes in European Art: On Drawing (1986) reveals, through its engagement with both Eastern and Western painting theory, how deeply he had already committed to drawing as a mode of visual thinking. When Korea’s first dedicated drawing institution, the SOMA Drawing Center, opened in 2006, Suh had already visited the Drawing Center in New York and served on its founding committee. His drawing exhibitions include a 1995 solo show, Self-portrait Drawings in New York; in 2016, the Arko Art Center chose a large-scale presentation of his drawings for its featured artist series.

Suh Yongsun, Oseam Hermitage, Graphite, watercolor on tracing paper, 27 × 17.8cm, 2025

This joint exhibition is the most comprehensive and concentrated focus on the Danjong series by Suh since Historical Imagination: The King Danjong Stories by Suh Yongsun at Art Center White Block in 2014. Beginning with his 1993 solo exhibition Suh Yongsun 1987–93: Diary of Nosan-gun (Danjong) at Shinsegae Gallery, the series has resurfaced through numerous exhibitions just when it might otherwise have faded from memory. Built up over decades, it forms the backbone of his work around history and occupies a distinct place in public consciousness — present in our collective memory like a recurring trace. By giving form to dimensions of Korean historical memory rarely encountered in the visual art of the time, the work proved arresting and helped bring discussions of contemporary history painting to the Korean art scene.

Suh Yongsun, Plot, Acrylic on paper, 50 × 66cm, 2006

Following his debut with pine tree paintings, Suh’s practice has moved through self-portraiture, the rapidly modernizing cityscape of Seoul and global metropolises, and mythological subjects, each a distinct cluster, yet all essentially linked to the realities and conditions of contemporary life. As Suh has said, “the face of reality is already historical,” and “painting is the act of pushing through the surface appearance of reality, uncovering the traces of fact.” The invisible mechanisms and forces latent in the absurdity of human existence, operative in every era, manifest through his characteristic expressivity as mysterious energies across distorted, unrealistic pictorial surfaces, arriving before us as genuine records of experience. From the Nosan-gun Diary to the Korean War series and Drawing Cheoram, each series began a decade or more ago and continues to accumulate, summoning related stories and historical memories along long trajectories —among the most distinctive features of his work. Of all these subjects, the stories of Danjong’s tragic life have been his most persistent theme: for most, a minor or forgotten chapter of history. For Suh, it is always here, now.

Suh Yongsun, Cheongnyeongpo, Acrylic on paper, 30 × 40cm, 2026

The Danjong drawings are a condensed mass of thought and sensation at the frontline of a painstaking artistic journey, woven from his bodily engagement with every site where history and memory are inscribed, alongside rigorous humanistic research. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter the core of Suh Yongsun’s artistic world through drawing, the most fundamental mode of his practice.

 

Gallery JJ
63 Apgujeong-ro 30-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea
+82 2-322-3979

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