The Justice

I like to consider myself a person who prizes material utility. I like when I can use one tool for multiple tasks or when one of my actions can accomplish two things in one fell swoop. But usually I only apply these preferences to gadgets, menial chores and the like. I value complexity and detailed ornamentation in art: I see Renoir's "Dance at the Bougival" and I take in every color, every blot of paint, every line, every fold in cloth, and this is what I prize above all in a visual art piece. If it is complex and painstakingly rendered, to me it is beautiful. And so when I walked into the Shapiro Campus Center Art Gallery, I wasn't immediately struck by aesthetic awe. I did, however, note that there was a definite beauty in the blocky and large designs of the prints hanging off the walls. And a homey friendliness, like that of your father's best friend, radiated from the resident artist Prof. Hoseob Yoon from Kookmin University of South Korea. After a brief introduction, he proceeded to business.

He offered me many items of the environmentally conscious and activist genre, such as a T-shirt made with completely organic materials that was graphically printed with a spinach-based tree-resin ink mix. I also received posters detailing his life and work printed on soy ink and the most inexpensive and organic papers available. As he gave me these eye-opening gifts, I slowly began to realize the true beauty that lay within his art. The complexity and detail was not in the external visuals but in the implicit and meaningful messages that they were intended to convey. The satisfied eye is not the end in this case, but only the tool for the more profound and beautiful significance of environmental urgency that strikes the viewer in Yoon's work. Inspired, I asked a few questions of the artist himself.

JustArts: What made you start your crusade for environmental action?

Hoseob Yoon: At an event called the 17th World Jamboree Mondial, I created a poster for a [non-governmental organization]. At that event, a Japanese college student named Miyashita Masayoshi asked me what an NGO was and how many volunteers were working towards preserving the environment, and I didn't know. Afterward, I looked it up and was spurred to activism. After that moment, I was changed.

Continued...

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