Hewitt Gallery of Art Exhibits Capstone Work of Recent Graduate Heui Tae Yoon ‘11

This watercolor by Heui Tae Yoon ’11 appears in his senior exhibition Where Do I Come From? What Am I? Where Am I Going? in the Hewitt Gallery of Art.

“This is the first time the art department has displayed the work of a graduating senior in the main gallery,” said Professor Hallie Cohen, chair of the art department at Marymount Manhattan. 

A studio art major from Seoul, South Korea, Yoon seeks to define his own identity as a Korean artist with this series of 11 watercolors and three oil paintings that he completed over the course of three months in an independent study with Professor Cohen. The watercolors served as studies for the three large-scale paintings. In his work, Yoon incorporates vivid colors from traditional Korean clothing and architecture and employs the strong painterly brushstrokes he admires in German Expressionism. 

Inspired by Paul Gauguin’s painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Yoon takes a similar title and theme of existential questions for his exhibition, Where Do I Come From? What Am I? Where Am I Going? Yoon’s compositions are presented as three levels: the first level represents the artist himself and human nature, the second level contains mythological creatures illustrating the conscious and unconscious, and the third level contains the realm of dreams. He had originally planned for his compositions to be painted as triptychs, which later developed as separate scenes on three different canvases. Finally, the compositions transpired as three “floors” incorporated in one painting. The top floor is a level of dreams that Yoon wants to see realized in life. The bird-, fish- and wolf-like animals in the middle represent an evolutional food chain in progress. The figures on the bottom carry the burden of all the imagery above them. 

“Heui Tae is an intuitive and prolific artist,” Cohen said. “I sometimes think he has pure pigment flowing through his veins. He has a well of creative ideas that emanate from the core of his being. He has been grappling with these concepts and images since his freshman year. His complex, rich and symbolic paintings beg close scrutiny so that the viewer can absorb the artist’s visual vocabulary.” 

Where Do I Come? What Am I? Where Am I Going? runs through mid-August 2011 in the Hewitt Gallery of Art. For more information about the Hewitt Gallery of Art, contact Professor Hallie Cohen at hcohen@mmm.edu.

Published: May 26, 2011