Through July 3, 2026
In 1944 Aldous Huxley published “The Perennial Philosophy,” an eclectic compendium of the sacred wisdom of the saints and sages of East and West, from Aquinas to the Upanishads. It’s a decidedly non-partisan anthology, aiming at finding the commonalities of various schools of faith and thought. The turn toward mysticism by the author of “Brave New World” was well received by the New York Times, which acclaimed it as “the most needed book in the world.” My yellowed 1970 paperback calls to me again from its place on the bookshelf after all these years: Tolle et lege! (“Take up and read” is said to have been an unseen child’s command to St. Augustine to read the Bible — subsequently changing his life.)
More than a half century later, many of us are disenchanted with the souless materialism of various belief systems — be they political, religious, or economic — all variously compromised, despite lofty rhetoric, by violence, fraud and exploitation. The odd couple of Leo Tolstoy and Suzi Gablik wrote books a century apart (1897 and 1984, respectively) arguing for an aesthetic less interested in formal innovation than in moral suasion to mixed results. We know the dangers of theocracy, but a new spiritual humanism in the visual arts could be part of a wider cultural shift from us-versus-them consumerist nihilism to a more enlightened, less belligerent world view consistent with the best teachings of Huxley’s golden oldies.
Which brings me to Younhee Paik, a Korean-born painter who has made the Bay Area her home since attending San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1960s. Paik studied with Bruce McGaw, Alvin Light, and Julius Hatofsky, whose turbulent semi-abstract landscapes are consonant with her spiritualized cosmos. Paik’s visionary paintings draw on both Asian and Western traditions, as the exhibition’s curator Philip E. Linhares (formerly Chief Curator at the Oakland Museum) points out: “The content and title of many of Younhee Paik’s paintings conjure movement both actual and metaphorical: ‘climb,’, ‘reaching,’ and ‘passage’ denote a sense of striving toward a goal, a destination, an accomplishment of the granting of a long sought wish.”
The recent idea of a spiritual journey or pilgrimage derives largely from Asian art. Modernism’s influence, despite having largely abandoned overt religious feeling, is nonetheless very much present. Paik works with exceptional painterly freedom, with the pigment applied, freely, wet on wet, to her large canvases and smaller aluminum-plate panels. Laid flat on a tabletop or on the floor, the artist works with implements such as brooms, associated with Abstract-Expressionism, with images developing without preconception — evolving and adapting toward an unseen but intuited result.
Paik also employs the Surrealist decalcomania technique used most notably by Max Ernst and Richard Oelze. Beyond its textural potential, frottage exploits oil paint’s viscosity, yielding drainage or rivulet patterns suggesting both growth and decay. Various archetypal motifs evoke the spiritual journey of life: boats, ladders, flames, planetary bodies, rippling water, furrowed land, bridges, and clouds.
“Reaching” is thus an appropriate title for this survey of twenty-odd paintings selected from the past two decades of work. Most are spatially ambiguous, neither landscapes nor skyscapes, but dreamscapes, or more precisely, states of mind. Paik’s suggestive titles are likewise evocative and universal, hinting at some mythopoetic system that encompasses all human culture: “Birth of Zeus,” “Golden Climb — Apollo #1,” “Miracle in the Night #2,” “Passage Through Cave,” “When We Reach.” Other titles are specific and personal, alluding to private events and meanings, to memorable or miraculous places and events experienced along the artist-pilgrim’s spiritual path: “Above Wave,” “First Trip to Venice,” “New Year,” “Nightingale in Winter.”
Geometric elements and mysterious symbols suggest that the organic flux of the monochromatic painterly backgrounds, which evoke Asian sumi-ink landscapes, may be understood or controlled — or not. Nature and culture are conveyed as complementary realms, but also as adversarial, as we westerners experience the unfamiliar and untamed. But everything is capable of transformation into its opposite, per the ancient Heraclitean concept of enantiodromia, the emergence of an unconscious opposite over time.
Shown along with the paintings in “Reaching” is a monumental nine-panel work, “White Night — April” (2003), executed on aluminum panels, that represents a time sequence, like comic book panels or movie frames. It is easy to conceive of a spring night spent in polar regions on a model galleon or a more maneuverable felucca. Either way, it’s a fittingly poetic craft for navigating Paik’s celestial waters.
