Over 170 works trace abstract painter’s six-decade career, features pieces from private collections including BTS' RM "Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me" at Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) At the age of 48, Korea’s abstract art pioneer Yoo Young-kuk opened his first solo exhibition in 1964 after devoting himself fully to painting.That had meant giving up on juggling art with his other work as a fisherman and running his family’s brewery business in his hometown of Uljin, North Gyeongsang Province.He turned away from academic posts as well, believing that an artist should commit fully to developing their own artistic world.The year marked a turning point for Yoo, whose iconic mountain paintings began evolving into his own abstract visual language. "Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me" at Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) "Work" by Yoo Young-kuk, 1981 (Youngkuk Art Foundation) “Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me” at the Seoul Museum of Art starts with that very turning point in 1964.The exhibition, the artist’s first retrospective, spans more than six decades of his career across 170 works and archival materials.“The mountain is not something before me, it is within me,” the artist once said.Repeatedly appearing throughout his works, the mountain became Yoo’s lifelong subject, evolving into a distinctive form of abstraction deeply influenced by his upbringing in Uljin, where steep mountain ranges meet the East Sea. This work by Yoo Young-kuk from the private collection of BTS' RM is currently on display at the Seoul Museum of Art. (Park Yuna/The Korea Herald) The exhibition includes rarely seen works from private collections, including a painting on loan from RM of BTS, who is known to be a fan of the artist and an avid Korean art collector.The SeMA exhibition is part of the museum's inaugural project, “Korean Modern Masters,” which seeks to shed light on Korea’s modern artists. For the modern period, the museum looks at the period before the Korean War (1950-1953) and following the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945).“There are still ongoing questions within Korean art history about how to define ‘modernity,’” curator Yeo Kyung-hwan said at the museum on May 18.“We chose Yoo Young-kuk as the inaugural artist for the series as he was best suited to reconnect the achievements of Korean modern art with the sensibilities of today.”Beginning with Yoo’s decisive turn in 1964, the exhibition looks back on his avant-garde experiments during his studies in Tokyo in the 1930s, returns to the height of his mature abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally, to his later works from the 1980s onward. "Work" by Yoo Young-kuk, 1961 (SeMA) "Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me" at Seoul Museum of Art on May 18 (Park Yuna/The Korea Herald) Beginning in the late 1950s, as expressionist abstraction entered into Korea, Yoo initially explored mountains through thick layers of paint and textured surfaces that created strong tactile effects.His compositions later became increasingly geometric, sharp and restrained, developing into the cool, structured abstraction that came to define his mature style.In his later years, color gradually became more emotional and contemplative, and mountains once again began to appear more prominently. The museum coined the term “psychological abstraction” to describe these later works.“What may initially appear as a return to landscape was not a regression from abstraction,” the curator said. “Rather, it was a process in which Yoo reconciled the sharp abstraction he had pursued throughout his life with an inner sense of nature and memory.” "Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me" at Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) “Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me” concludes with two 2.2-meter-tall paintings created in 1994, several years before the artist died at the age of 84. The rare works were completed with limited assistance, the curator said, as the artist found it physically difficult to finish large-scale canvases in his later years.“Because painting was directly connected to the artist’s mind, Yoo insisted on doing everything himself without assistants,” the curator said. “He was also known for maintaining a disciplined daily routine, entering his studio at 9 am and leaving at 6 pm like an office worker.”He produced some 800 oil paintings over the course of his life.“Yoo Youngkuk: A Mountain Within Me” opened May 19 and runs through Oct. 25 at the Seoul Museum of Art. A profile photograph of Yoo Young-kuk during his years studying in Japan, late 1930s to early 1940s (Youngkuk Art Foundation)