Young shin Ryu is a highly accomplished contemporary painter who for the past five years has focused her attention on representing the formal elegance of birch trees. Like many Korean painters, her point of view is to envision forms in nature that contain the Qi or quiet energy. She discovered the natural movements of the trunks, branches, and leaves of these vibrant trees while observing the effect of breezes blowing through the forest glade.

Inspired by what she saw, artist RYU YOUNG SHIN(서양화가 류영신, 柳栐愼) chose to transform this rhythmic sensation into an epic of wonderment through the art of painting. It is precisely this sense of wonder that intrigued the artist, thus giving the artist a necessary focus by which to concentrate and transform her perceptions of nature through her lingering experience in the birch forest.

Why birch tress? They are strong, yet delicate in their movement. They hold their presence in a way that reveals their special attributes. They are trees that have often been favored by poets, specifically the American poet, Robert Frost, who spoke of birch in his eloquent verse. There is little doubt that poets in Korea have also found the occasion to mention the birch tree.

Because of the innate strength of their branches and their extraordinary flexibility to move with the blithe currents of wind, to go with the movement and then slowly retreat, they hold a symbolic connotation, a sign of liberated strength whereby the mind and body move together in direct counterpoint to one another. Rather than going against the force of the wind, the birch tree holds its place in time as it moves with its designated space. The Korean ink painters favored this point of view in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries during the Chosen Dynasty, concurrent with the Ming Dynasty in China.

The birch tree is the epitome of endurance and well-being. It is curious that Young shin Ryu was trained in the Western style of painting, to work with oil paints, as her paintings make clear. While cognizant of indigenous brush painting, she currently favors the use of oil pigments. Perhaps, this allows her liberation from the ties of the past or at least brings that tradition into a new focus by offering another point of view.

Still diligent and resourceful in her approach and in her style and method, Ryu embraces the challenges of finding harmony with these indigenous trees as the primary subject matter of her work. Ryu Young Shin has adopted two formidable styles of painting: one includes the realist approach, resembling the rational elements found in both late nineteenth century Impressionism, while the other relies on the irrational use of color made popular by the Fauvisme, such as Matisse and Vlaminck, in early twentieth century.

Both come from French painting and employ intense levels of color-saturation. Clearly Ryu has perfected her technique not only in terms of handling the brushwork but also in choosing the colors that maintain an even gradation of light across the surface of her canvases.

△Robert C. Morgan