Young Sup Han’s “Forest 2010” is currently on display at Olyaa Gallery in North Bergen.
Picture hundreds of black lines on a canvas as big as the flatbed of a truck. Some cross each other, some run in parallel, some fade into a misty white background, and some are firm and fiercely rendered. They fly to the corners of the frame like a burst of arrows. They are vectors of speed and change — tracks for the eye to follow.
Step back and the piece makes some profound suggestions: It may look like a locked door at the end of a long haunted hall, or a blueprint by a mad architect, or a tangle of branches in the wind, or a strip of weather-scored birch bark. This is not a painting. It’s got too much depth for that. It isn’t sculptural in feel, either. Rather, the surface of the piece seems soft, like a sheet pulled taut over a mattress.
This piece resides alongside many others like it in a large but unassuming building on a residential side street in North Bergen. The Olyaa Gallery, which is open every weekday, is spacious enough to be subdivided into several exhibition areas. The main room is dedicated to works by resident artist Young Sup Han, and it is Young Sup Han who gives the place its odd and otherworldly character. A few of the pieces on view are modest in scale. But most feel like portals: large enough to step into if you could step into an artwork, and possessing a layered, linen-like texture that promises that step would feel like a caress and maybe an enticement to slumber and dream.
“Relationship,” by Young Sup Han.
Young Sup Han achieves this effect through takbon, a traditional Korean technique that involves ink, pressure, inanimate objects, and time. A takbon printmaker places saturated pieces of paper on a natural surface and then stains the surface of those strips with pigment. Not just any paper will do. The preferred medium is hanji, a feathery handmade sheet made from the filaments of mulberry tree bark. High grade hanji paper has no consistent grain. Instead, it seems to be held together by faith alone. Appearances deceive: hanji only looks fragile. It has the tensile strength of finely woven fabric and the pliability of skin. When ink makes contact with hanji, it leaves an impression of depth uncommon in any medium. A mark made by a master on hanji feels more consequential than one made on a lower quality paper — it is searing, irreducible, and hard to look away from.
Thus takbon pieces reward protracted engagement. The works in the Olyaa collection invite you to get lost in them. They are impressive at a glance, but they can’t be properly apprehended until they have been stared at for a while. What initially looks like pure abstraction reveals, upon inspection, traces of nature. The hanji printmaker takes the fingerprints of grass, leaves and rocks, using the paper as a blotter, and fashioning artwork from that signature. That allows Young Sup Han to get closer to his subject — the world around him — than an artist engaged in mimetic representation ever can. “Forest,” a gorgeous recent piece, plunges the viewer into fall foliage through blots of yellow, orange and green ink and takbon impressions of wood. It has the stillness and the breadth of color of an untamed mountainside on a warm October day.
“Forest,” by Young Sup Han.
Other Young Sup Han print pieces evoke the undulations of waves, the flow of river currents, and the roughness of unbroken ground. At times, he even seems to get an impression of air in motion. Another large-scale piece (also confusingly called “Forest”) is a flurry of diagonal lines on gently wrinkled hanji. The black objects appear to fly at the viewer, propelled by an invisible turbine located somewhere behind the canvas. Should you let the work fill your field of vision — not difficult, given its size — you may feel the wind in your hair.
This approach to mulberry pulp paper is undoubtedly macho. It’s big; it’s sensational; it makes an immediate impression; it wrestles with the natural world and occasionally even manages to pin it down. But as those who saw Yoonhee Ryoony Suh’s spectacular late 2023 “Memory Gap” show at MANA Contemporary in Jersey City know, that is not the only way to work with hanji. Suh engaged in an extreme form of takbon-influenced printing: she left plant matter to ferment on huge sheets of paper for days. The visual result of this elaborate process was intimate and modest as a marble in a child’s pocket. Yoonhee Ryoony Suh used hanji and takbon to suggest private interior states, and Young Hie Nam — Young Sup Han’s wife — is up to something similar.
To see her hanji paper works, you have to go to the back of the cubicle-like exhibition spaces in the rear of Olyaa Gallery, but it’s a detour well worth taking.
If Young Sup Han’s pieces ride the tiger of natural forces, Young Hie Nam’s paper assemblages feel like expressions of harmony and balance. In “Creation,” she layers translucent strips of yellow-green and sunrise-orange strips of hanji and lets the paper on the bottom peek out from behind the paper on the top. In so doing, she creates a sunny corridor for the viewer’s gaze to inhabit. In “Starry Night,” a play of overlapping blue quadrilaterals of varying color saturation, she turns her face to the sky, and finds light that falls with the grace of snowflakes.
When she bunches up her paper, as she does on another piece called “Creation,” it achieves the fragile quality of dried rose petals.
“Flower — Hwashin No. 2,” by Young Sup Han.
Given the heft of the paper he uses, it is not surprising that Young Sup Han also thinks sculpturally. There aren’t as many three-dimensional pieces on view at Olyaa Gallery as framed works, but those that are there are hard to miss. They tend to be big enough to perch on, but designed to discourage sitting. “Flower — Hwashin No. 2,” big as a beer barrel, is a cylinder made of wooden blocks, arranged so each of the square ends sticks a few centimeters out into space. If that isn’t sufficiently attention grabbing, Young Sup Han has painted the whole thing bright red. He likes dousing his hammered-together planks of wood in bright pigment and positioning them so they photo-bomb the austere prints. Juxtaposed with the stormy grayscale of the takbon prints, they look like prickly fruit in the bread aisle.
Then there is the piece that makes it seem like the artist is trolling us a little. Near to the enormous hanji paper pieces and the sculptures providing color commentary is a small drawing of a country farmhouse and its protective wall. The building is lovingly captured in small pen-strikes, and accented with subtle color: the yellow-grays of the stone face of the tower and the faded brown of a nearby hill. It is utterly unlike the rest of the work on view at Olyaa Gallery, and it suggests that Young Sup Han could have been an outstanding architectural draftsman if he wanted to.
Instead, he has attuned himself to the earth, listened to the wind and water, and felt the tug and press of gravity. He is less interested in the way things look than the way things are. And in that spirit, he presses on.
“Echoes of Nature: The Art of Young Sup Han” is currently being shown at Olyaa Gallery in North Bergen. Visit olyaagallery.com.
For more on Young Sup Han, visit hanyoungsup.art.
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