Donald Judd and Yun Hyong-keun reunite in SoHo after 33 years

By Daniel Okafor

An almost exact recreation of Donald Judd and Yun Hyong-keun’s 1993 exhibition is now at 101 Spring Street in Manhattan, 33 years after the artists installed six paintings on its ground floor.

Andrew Russeth reported that the building now serves as a museum and exhibition space run by the Judd Foundation. The show functions like a reopened guestbook: six paintings, one address and the echo of a dinner. Russeth described Yun’s works as austere and alluring. He called the idea that art transcends language and culture a well-worn cliché, but found it heartening here.

The 1993 opening dinner survives in fragments. Flavin, Donald Judd’s son, said: “I have no memory of it, except a small exchange of words between our fathers.”

How did Judd and Yun meet?

According to Russeth, Judd saw the minimalist paintings (art stripped back to spare geometric forms) during a 1991 solo exhibition at a now-defunct Seoul gallery, where they remained from an earlier presentation. Dark blocks sat on raw, unpainted canvas. Intrigued, Judd asked to meet Yun Hyong-keun. A friendship followed.

In 1993, Judd invited Yun to exhibit at his SoHo (lower Manhattan) home, and the two selected half a dozen paintings for the ground-floor installation at 101 Spring Street. Judd hosted a dinner on the opening night.

Yun Seong-ryeol recalled that the artists had been born within a few months of each other in 1928, on opposite sides of the world. Judd did not speak Korean, and Yun did not speak English.

What happened at the opening dinner?

Flavin told Russeth last month from the basement of 101 Spring, where he sat opposite Yun Seong-ryeol, whose family had just opened Yun’s airy Seoul home and studio to the public. He continued: “It was the kind of dinner where you have, I don’t know, six people and three translators.”

Speaking through an interpreter, Yun Seong-ryeol said: “What I felt was that they didn’t need much communication with words because they were both very intuitive people.”

Yun Seong-ryeol recalled the close bond between the two artists. Russeth reported that the sons were back together for the recreated exhibition. Flavin explained: “I thought it would be nice to do again.” He estimated: “I think maybe 20 people saw the original show.”

Why did Yun buy a Judd painting?

In Seoul, a work by Judd that Yun purchased in the early 1990s now hangs on the wall of Yun’s old home, Yun Seong-ryeol said. The artist took a risk with the purchase.

“He looked in his bank account, and he had exactly the amount of money he needed to buy that work,” he said. His father told his mother: “I really need this work, and I need to put it up there. But we are going to be broke after.” She gave her approval.

Russeth reported that Judd died a couple of months after the SoHo show, aged 65, and that Yun had died in 2007 at 79. Yun Seong-ryeol said: “My father was heartbroken.” Russeth described Yun as one of the most revered Korean artists of the 20th century.

What did the Korean flag change?

During the 1991 visit to Seoul, the Yun family asked Judd what he wanted as a going-away present, and he made a request: a Korean flag.

Yun Seong-ryeol recounted Judd’s answer: “When you have an exhibition in Texas, we are going to put up the Korean flag, front and center,” the American artist told him.

The plan to show Yun’s work at the Chinati Foundation, Judd’s foundation in Marfa, Texas, came to fruition only after Judd’s death, Russeth reported.

Flavin said: “Don was very clear that the work he liked, he liked,” and continued: “And the work he didn’t, he didn’t.”

Where else can their work meet?

Russeth reported that the blockbuster exhibition curated by BTS star RM at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art now presents Judd’s and Yun’s work together, another reunion after the SoHo revival.

Yun Seong-ryeol said later: “Even meeting one person like that in your lifetime is special.” He added: “I think that they saw something in each other. They really understood each other.”

The reopened Seoul house and studio, the museum exhibition and the recreated SoHo show now carry the artists’ exchange beyond an opening dinner of six people and three translators, and beyond the audience Flavin estimates at about 20. The test is whether those settings can preserve that intimacy without reducing a friendship to a curatorial footnote.