Monster Magnate
SunKoo Yuh: Along the Way
It almost seems as if SunKoo Yuh unpacked his dreams and nightmares and stacked their contents higgledy-piggledy in the Art Alliance. On every pedestal, porcelain archetypes tangle with culture-bound and cryptic personal imagery. Men make gestures of listening, looking, calming and embracing. Their eyes stare or roll back in death or trance.
Beside them on piles of skulls, women crouch. Naked or modestly formal, they nurture, flirt and scheme. Animal masks and propitious dragons, pigs and tigers rub shoulders with birds, fish and bloody-fanged monsters. Each being has the demanding vitality of an incubated Alien popping out of its host's chest. Yet each is beautiful, more alive than anything from Hollywood.
The inventory of crowns, lotuses, cups, roses and grenades is by turns scary, humorous, repellent and reassuring — reassuring because a version of this teeming clutter lurks in everyone's brain. But maybe we don't confront our inner complexities as bravely as Yuh.
Yuh, a Korean American, now on the faculty of the University of Georgia in Athens, Ga., draws upon Korean culture in several ways. In particular, white porcelain wares were brought to a high level of development early in Korea and, for example, played a seminal role in the development of Japanese pottery. Yuh's mastery of porcelain techniques and construction of large sculptural works fired to cone 10 (2,300-2,380 degrees F) is stunning. In addition, he uses dozens of glazes, shiny and matte, on a single piece of sculpture. Often the glaze is splashed on. Sometimes the placement is quite deliberate, as in areas within a composition decorated in linear cobalt patterns to suggest blue and white glazed wares or in separately fired metallic lustres: silver on a mirror or gold on ingots. Comparison to groundbreaking sculptor Robert Arneson is inescapable; there's a similar, almost demonic energy and, likewise, a refusal to bow to technical limitations.
Helen Drutt English, who cannot be sufficiently thanked for her contributions to the Philadelphia art community, is a longtime supporter of Yuh. She lent most of the works to the show and wrote a fine essay for the catalog.
SunKoo Yuh: Along the Way
Philadelphia Art Alliance 251 S. 18th St., 215-545-4302, philartalliance.org
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