Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

In 1999, he held his first solo exhibition, 《hee hee hee》 (1999, Gallery Jo, Seoul, Korea) at the Jo Sung-hee Gallery. It was an exhibition that well expressed the purpose of the work that the artist had in the beginning. The artist wanted to continue to work with the thoughts and mindset he had at the beginning, and this was the exhibition that best suited it.

In 2005, 《echowords》 exhibition was held at One and J Gallery. In this exhibition, two series of ‘Text Landscape’ and ‘Text Play’ were presented. ‘echowords’ has a dictionary meaning of ‘words to imitate’ and is a representative term for his drawings made up of meaningless words such as onomatopoeia and mimic words.

The artist also participated in the residency program at Doosan Gallery New York, where he held 《echowords》 (2013, Doosan Gallery, New York, USA). The artist pays attention to the interrelationship between the words written in the work and the images seen there. The word ‘echowords’ means that words can imitate images, images can imitate words, and it can also be some interaction between the two.

In 2017, he held a solo exhibition titled From Head to Toe at P21. In this exhibition, the ‘Text Play’ series was mainly composed of calligraphic shapes using Chaucer among calligraphic typefaces. ‘Text Play’ is a playful work that looks like a childish pun that comedians or children play.

For example, indicates a cerebrovascular disorder caused by cerebral blood vessel bleeding, but in English, it is also pronounced as ‘natural’, meaning ‘natural’. is an onomatopoeic word for pressing her urine, but in English it means ‘she’.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

The artist participated in the group exhibition 《Kongsan Art Festival》 held at Dong-Ah Gallery in 1998. This exhibition was the first time the artist presented her work to the public. Because the work creates an image as text and forms a pixel unit with dots, it gives a different feeling from existing painting, so I thought that people felt it anew and received a good response.

After presenting his work in this exhibition, the artist gained confidence and confidence in his work.

Participated in the exhibition 《Oriental Metaphor》 (2006, Alternative Space Loop, Seoul, Korea) in 2006. 11 artists from Korea, China, Japan participated and toured in Korea, China, and Japan. As Asian art begins to play an active part on the world stage, “Why is contemporary Asian art attracting attention?” This exhibition was planned from the question.

In 2014, Doosan Gallery Seoul participated in the two-person exhibition 《CLOSE-UP》 with artist Ham Jin (2014, Doosan Gallery, Seoul, Korea). Yoo Seungho presents a painting in which small letters written in ink on paper are gathered to create a landscape.

Through the works of Yoo Seungho and Ham Jin, who individually reveal their distinct styles by employing methods of expansion and repetition, and reduction and transformation, this exhibition presents viewers with a perceptive experience that differs depending on the distance from which one views an artwork, and brings viewers face-to-face with the hidden world that exists beneath an image’s surface.

In addition, 《Beginning of New Era》 (2009, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea), 《Korean Alphabet: The Art of Inspiration and Interaction》 (2013, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea), 《Hangeul Calligraphy x Latin Typography》 (2016, Seoul Arts Center Seoul Calligraphy Art Museum, Seoul, Korea), 《The Elegance of Silence》 (2005, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan), etc. Participated in several group exhibitions held at home and abroad.

Awards (Selected)

The artist won Excellency Reward at the 5th Kongsan Art Festival in 1998 and the 22nd ‘The 22th Suk Nam Arts Prize’ in 2002.

The 22th Suk Nam Arts Prize is selected by the Suk Nam Art and Culture Foundation for young artists under the age of 35, and the artist was selected at the young age of 28.

Collections (Selected)

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), Burger Collection (Hong Kong, Hong Kong) Seoul Museum of Art, (Seoul, Korea), Doosan Gallery (Seoul, Korea), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, USA), other collections have been.

Originality & Identity

Yoo Seungho argues that “Segmenting, deconstructing, and rendering meaningless is the essence of my work”. Rather than presupposing the subject, he delivers and twists the established meaning to develop filming that appeals to primitive play and intuition. His art is based on ‘writing-drawing’.

He composes the images with his imagination as well as the pen writing with tiny words on the screen repeatedly. For example, his representative series ‘Text Landscape’ completes images of Chinese landscapes with small words that seemingly are not related to each other.

However, in some of his works, words and form images do not have a direct relationship. In his series ‘echowords’, the landscape is reconstructed using words with tunes or the playful words of the artist’s unique ideas. The worlds inside the artwork remove the meaning and weight that the artist referred from the original one. Furthermore, the old paintings are recontextualized by injecting a modern way of thinking, which reveals the artist’s unique humor.

In his solo exhibition, 《Yuchihan》(Gallary Plant, Seoul), held in 2010, he shows his works where he applies his colour dots. Although it is a basic unit of modeling, an image using a point gives a meaning of abstraction, unlike the common character arithmetic. This is the result of Yoo Seungho applying the principle of hieroglyphs in reverse, establishing an arbitrary relationship between letters and mages, and then transforming them several times.

In the ‘Hypertext’ series, letters and images are placed in an organically close relationship. Yoo Seungho focuses on loose associations and repetitions before the meaning of the text is defined, and he expands this point to a ‘play of sight’ and a ‘play of words’ to deepen the poetic potential of his work.

In his solo exhibition 《Head to toe》(2017, P21, Seoul), he presents disproportionately large objects, such as calligraphy shapes using cursive characters using the typeface of Jeonghee KIM, Suckbong, Buckshong Hwi jong. In another exhibition 《Miss Lamella》(CR collective, Seoul), he presents a canvas painting in which letters float more freely in the space of the screen. It uses the same methods as Yoo Seungho’s previous work as a starting point. However, he creates new landscape artworks by using pen ink smears on the screen as coincidental outcomes.

In Yoo Seungho’s work, the meaning of countless letters/symbols and the meanings of images created by those letters/symbols come and go between collision and overlap, separation and combination. This implies the mutual reflexivity of perception and language. At the same time, this highlights the fluid relations between text and image.

As a result, it can be interpreted as a ‘process of blurring the boundaries,’ and by doing so, between subject and background, which explores the possibilities of different directions for art.

Style & Contents

The audience who sees Yoo Seungho’s work for the first time is overwhelmed by the labour-intensive chain of letters or pointillism.

An image that looks like a single landscape or word from a distance appears as a sum of countless letters, dots, and shapes when you get closer. At this time, the audience watches the reproduction of the past landscape artworks and, at the same time, reads the image in which the letters and signs are intertwined. In the process of reading, the audience enters the world of language play unique to Yoo Seungho’s art world.

“My play is to let heavy meanings flow lightly and float freely in the space of the screen. In the end, into the dream where only pleasure, instinct, pleasure, and humour retain…So the text and images represented on the screen are playing with me, laughing ‘hehehe’ ”

Another method of his work, which compares his work to play, is for “light usage”. However, while the form is brought in from Western masterpieces, all private contexts like painting techniques, ideas, and theories are excluded. By filling the vacant space with visually cheerful language, it becomes a picture to be seen, read, and heard.

On the other hand, Yoo Seungho only used a pen to mainly produce black and white images, but he also tried to install a fluorescent screen in 2017, after 《Hypertext 》(2012, Nanji Gallery, Seoul).

Constancy & Continuity

Since his debut, Yoo Seungho has been recognized for his innovativeness and originality. He breaks down the boundary between image and text, which has been considered to be divided in the long history of art. He further developed a painting in which visual, perceptual, and auditory elements were overlapped in various ways, establishing himself in the contemporary painting reality.

The artist says that it is important to know the origin of “What they were like in the past, What kind of thoughts they had, and How they made art”.

So he continues his exploration of traditional oriental paintings and calligraphy. Additionally, the artist approaches not only the words of Hangeul but also the world of English and the hieroglyphs that are the origin of many letters. It is the world of language most similarly in contact with images.

The source of his work never dries up as he breathes new life into the old by reinterpreting the origins and traditions with his imagination and associative powers.

The fact that he stimulates various human senses by adding humour to the intuition and imagination that transcends the past and present may be the reason why his work is fonded with inclusiveness beyond borders.

In 2005, Yoo Seungho was sold at HKD 564,000 (approximately USD 72,000), twice the estimated price as a character arithmetic work at Christie’s auction in Hong Kong. He also received favourable reviews from the Hong Kong Basel Art Fair and Abu Dhabi Art Fair, in which he participated in 2016. He received strong attention from these fairs and markets.