Yun Hyong-keun Prices: Early Umber-Blue Canvases Sell at Three Times the Later Work
What 104 Yun Hyong-keun lots sold at Korean auction between 2022 and 2026 show: the title tells you the decade, a 1970s Umber-Blue makes about three times a later canvas of the same size, and the yearly median doubled for reasons that have nothing to do with price.
On 26 August 2026 K Auction sold a 1976 Umber-Blue by Yun Hyong-keun for $156,616. It is 31x40cm, a 6 ho canvas small enough to hang over a desk. A later Burnt Umber & Ultramarine of the same size typically makes between $30,000 and $37,000 at Korean auction. Same painter, same two pigments, same scale, and roughly four times the price.
This piece is about the 104 Yun Hyong-keun lots that sold at Korean auction from 16 February 2022 to 26 August 2026. All figures are hammer prices from K-artmarket records, converted at 1,340.86 won to the dollar, the rate in my tracker in September 2026. Unsold lots are not in the data, so everything below describes work that found a buyer.
The bad news first. This is a thin record: 79 unique works in four and a half years, about 17 a year, and only six 1970s Umber-Blue canvases among them. Most of the tables below rest on a handful of lots, and one or two paintings move a median a long way. The records also carry a year of execution on only two rows, so the dating in this piece comes from a registration number, which I explain below.
Who he was
Yun was born in 1928 in Cheongju, North Chungcheong province; David Zwirner gives the village as Miwon-ri. He entered Seoul National University in 1947 and was expelled after joining protests against the government's plan for the national university. He graduated from Hongik University in 1957.
The state kept finding him. According to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), he narrowly escaped execution after being taken by the Bodo League in 1950, and served six months in Seodaemun Prison in 1956 on a charge of collaborating during the war. He taught art at Sookmyung Girls' High School from 1961. In 1973 he questioned a student's admission that had been arranged through the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, and was arrested under the Anti-Communist Law.
That same year, at 45, he began painting in earnest, which the MMCA dates to 1973. He spent 1980 to 1982 in Paris and died in December 2007. Kim Whanki was his teacher and his father-in-law.
How the paintings are made
Yun called his subject the gate of heaven and earth: blue for the sky, umber for the ground. He mixed the two into a near black and laid it on untreated cotton or linen in broad vertical columns. The titles name the pigments, which is why so many of them read Umber-Blue or Burnt Umber & Ultramarine.
The paint was thinned until it ran. On its artist page, David Zwirner writes that he "diluted the pigments with turpentine solvent, allowing them to seep into the fibers of the support". The edges of each column bleed, and the unpainted cloth stays part of the picture.
Exhibitions
Museum and institutional shows, kept apart from commercial ones because mixing them makes a record look bigger than it is:
- MMCA Seoul retrospective, opened August 2018; Newsis reported about 320,000 visitors
- Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Yun Hyong-keun: A Retrospective, 11 May to 24 November 2019, organised by the MMCA with the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. PKM Gallery calls it "the first international retrospective show of the artist since his death"
- Solo museum shows listed in the PKM Gallery CV include Cheongju Museum of Art (2024), Hastings Contemporary (2023), the municipal museum in Strasbourg (2002), Art Sonje Center (2001), the Chinati Foundation (1994) and the Donald Judd Foundation (1993)
- São Paulo Biennial (1969, 1975), 46th Venice Biennale (1995), Gwangju Biennale (2000)
- Collections named by David Zwirner include Tate, the Art Institute of Chicago, Glenstone, M+ and the Chinati Foundation
Commercially, PKM Gallery in Seoul represents the estate, and David Zwirner has represented the work in New York since 2016. He has also had solo shows at Blum & Poe, Simon Lee and Axel Vervoordt.
The record prices, in Korea and abroad
These are the lots I could confirm at 300 million won or more, from press reports and the auction record. From 2022 the source is the full K-artmarket record; before that, a Newsis ranking of Korean house results for 2015 to mid 2019. Some lots will be missing.
| Price | Basis | Work | Size | Sale | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $522,053 | Hammer | Umber '90-66 | 227x161cm | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 29 Mar 2024 |
| $484,764 | Not stated | Umber Ble (as printed) | Not stated | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 29 Mar 2024 |
| $469,848 | Hammer | Umber-Blue, 1978 | 142x174cm | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 27 Feb 2024 |
| $372,895 | Hammer | Untitled | 130x162cm | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 10 Sep 2024 |
| $350,999 | Not stated | Umber-Blue, 1977 | 67.7x199.7cm | Seoul Auction, Hong Kong | 27 Nov 2016 |
| $343,063 | Hammer | Burnt Umber & Ultramarine Blue | 194x129.5cm | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 22 Mar 2022 |
| $298,316 | Hammer | Burnt Umber & Ultramarine Blue | 182x227cm | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 26 Apr 2022 |
| $290,858 | Hammer | Burnt Umber & Ultramarine Blue | 227x181cm | K Auction, Seoul | 26 Apr 2023 |
| $268,484 | Hammer | Burnt Umber & Ultramarine Blue | 100x65.1cm | K Auction, Seoul | 25 May 2022 |
| $261,027 | Hammer | Untitled | 89.4x145.5cm | K Auction, Seoul | 22 Jun 2022 |
| $238,653 | Hammer | Burnt Umber & Ultramarine Blue | 162x130cm | K Auction, Seoul | 29 Apr 2026 |
| $234,722 | Not stated | Untitled, 1978 | 162.6x130.3cm | Seoul Auction, Hong Kong | 31 May 2015 |
| $224,796 | Not stated | Untitled, 1990 | 193.8x253.5cm | Seoul Auction, Hong Kong | 5 Oct 2015 |
| $223,737 | Hammer | Burnt Umber & Ultramarine | 130x162cm | K Auction, Seoul | 21 Feb 2024 |
| $223,737 | Hammer | Umber-Blue | 72x60.5cm | Seoul Auction, Seoul | 22 Mar 2022 |
Two caveats sit inside the table. The Umber Ble at $484,764 appears only in a Newsis report of the 29 March 2024 sale, which says the two Yun lots sold "가 각각 7억원과 6억 5000만원에 낙찰됐다", for 700 million and 650 million won. The first matches the record; the second is nowhere in K-artmarket, and I cannot tell whether the record missed it or the report is wrong. The three Hong Kong lots come from the Newsis ranking, which does not say whether its won figures include the premium.
No foreign house result I could find reaches this table. The highest Phillips results on its artist page are HK$882,000 and £139,700, both under 300 million won. Artprice wrote in 2023 that Yun's record is a 1975 Umber-Blue 7-IIII-75 sold at Christie's Hong Kong in 2016, but gave no figure, and I could not find the price on Christie's lot page. So the claim that the top of the market is in Seoul holds for what I could confirm, and no further.
Read with that limit, the table says two things. The top moved after 2018. In the Newsis ranking to mid 2019 the best result was $350,999, and every lot over 300 million won was at Seoul Auction's Hong Kong sales. Since 2022, eleven confirmed lots have cleared that line in Seoul alone, up to $522,053. In between came the Zwirner representation, the MMCA retrospective and Venice. I would not say the museums set the price, but after them a large Yun canvas rarely sold under 300 million won in Seoul.
And the international reputation has not produced international auction prices. An artist held by Tate and shown by Zwirner in New York and Paris would usually set his records in Hong Kong or New York. Yun's large paintings seem to reach foreign collectors through the galleries instead. While PKM and Zwirner are supplying the work, a collector abroad has little reason to wait for a saleroom.
What I took out first
Nothing, as it turned out. There were no posters or merchandise, no multi-work lots and no truncated prices among the 104. They split into 63 oils on cloth (linen, cotton, hemp or canvas), 15 oils on paper, 25 prints and one lot whose medium field reads only Untitled.
| Support | Lots | Median | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oil on cloth | 63 | $70,850 | $11,187 to $522,053 |
| Oil on paper | 15 | $34,306 | $15,662 to $82,037 |
| Prints | 25 | $3,207 | $2,237 to $6,339 |
Paper sells at about half of cloth, a far smaller gap than at Lee Ufan (six to one) or Kim Whanki (eight to one). The reason is in the medium field. Lee's and Kim's works on paper are mostly watercolour, gouache and pencil. All fifteen of Yun's are oil on paper, the same paint handled the same way, so the market seems to read them as the same work on a different ground rather than as studies. The ceiling is low, one sheet over $75,000, but the floor sits close to the canvases.
The title tells you the decade
Four titles recur: Umber-Blue, Umber, Burnt Umber & Ultramarine (sometimes with Blue at the end), and Untitled. The K-artmarket registration number (UCI) for each lot appears to contain a year. For the four lots whose date I could check independently, a 1968 Untitled, a 1976 Umber-Blue, Umber 90-27 and Untitled '95-#601, the number matches. One, Umber-Blue '78, is a year off. Read that way, the titles sort into periods.
| Title | Years by registration number | Lots | Median | Median area | Median per cm2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Umber-Blue | 1976 to 1978 | 7 | $134,242 | 1,240cm2 | $88 |
| Umber | 1988 to 1991 | 4 | $156,616 | 6,960cm2 | $23 |
| Burnt Umber & Ultramarine | 1989 to 2007 | 24 | $64,138 | 1,924cm2 | $39 |
| Untitled and others | 1968 to 1997 | 28 | $58,171 | 1,749cm2 | $34 |
Oils on cloth only. The seven Umber-Blue lots include one painting sold twice.
The Umber-Blue canvases are the smallest group and cost the most per square centimetre, two to four times the others. Hold size fixed and it is plainer. At 10 ho and under, five Umber-Blue lots have a median of $104,411 and twelve Burnt Umber & Ultramarine lots $33,933, about three to one.
The pictures differ too. In the K-artmarket photographs the 1970s canvases tend to show translucent brown columns with a pale band of cloth glowing between them; the later ones are closer to solid black blocks pressing on the ground. That is an impression from small thumbnails, not a study.
Work from before 1973 is another market again. Two lots can be dated that early by their numbers: a 1968 canvas of 10 ho at Seoul Auction in August 2026 for $14,916, against an estimate of $13,424 to $29,832, and a 1970 canvas of 46x36cm at I Auction in November 2025 for $11,187. The 1976 Umber-Blue of 6 ho made more than ten times either.
My reading is that the market is buying a period, not a signature. Yun's columns begin in 1973, and the first years of them are the most expensive; what he painted before carries the same name and sells an order of magnitude lower. With six 1970s Umber-Blue canvases in the period, three to one is a direction rather than a rate.
The yearly median doubled, and prices did not
Across all unique works the median nearly doubled between 2022 and 2026. Hold size fixed and the story changes.
| Year | Oils on cloth, 10 ho and under | Median |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 5 | $44,747 |
| 2023 | 10 | $51,832 |
| 2024 | 11 | $39,527 |
| 2025 | 6 | $34,306 |
| 2026 | 4 | $80,172 |
Apart from 2023, small canvases drifted down from 2022 to 2025. The 2026 jump is two of four lots being 1970s Umber-Blue canvases at $156,616 and $134,242. The paintings did not get dearer; the dearer period came up.
Supply thinned at the same time. Unique works ran 19, 22 and 21 lots from 2022 to 2024, then 9 in 2025 and 8 to the end of August 2026. For an artist with this little turnover, a year's figures describe which decade happened to be consigned more than where prices are going.
When the same painting comes back
I compared the photographs of every title and size that appeared more than once. Six pairs are the same painting.
| Work | Support | Size | First | Next | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burnt Umber & Ultramarine | Linen | 40x27cm | May 2023, $47,731 | Sep 2023, $41,018 | -14% |
| Work | Paper | 31x62cm | May 2023, $32,815 | Sep 2023, $35,798 | +9% |
| Untitled | Linen | 33x24cm | Dec 2023, $35,798 | Apr 2025, $35,798 | 0% |
| Umber-Blue | Linen | 24x37cm | Jul 2024, $78,308 | Oct 2025, $70,850 | -10% |
| Untitled | Linen | 33x19cm | Oct 2024, $33,561 | Mar 2026, $38,781 | +16% |
| Burnt Umber & Ultramarine | Linen | 22x16cm | Nov 2024, $14,916 | Jun 2026, $26,103 | +75% |
Five of the six sold at K Auction and came back to K Auction. Two came back after four months: both sold on 31 May 2023 and reappeared on 20 September. Seoul Auction's buyer's premium at its live sales is 18 per cent before VAT, reported by Asia Economy in February 2026, and the seller pays commission on top, so the lot that rose 9 per cent in four months lost money for whoever resold it. The only pair here that could have covered its costs is the 22x16cm canvas that went from K Auction to Seoul Auction, and it is a $15,000 painting.
Prints: mostly one 1995 screenprint
Twenty-two of the 25 prints are untitled screenprints, and fifteen carry a 1995 registration number. They come in a few recurring sizes, around 48x68cm, 55x74cm and 60x80cm. The yearly median went from $4,400 in 2022 to $2,983 in 2024 and 2025. Where the same size came back, the price usually fell: a 48.5x68.5cm sheet from $5,221 in 2022 to $2,237 in December 2025, a 74x48cm sheet from $6,339 to $2,983.
K-artmarket carries no edition numbers, so I cannot say whether any sheet was resold or these are different sheets of the same edition. Seventeen of the 25 sold in online sales, against two of the 63 oils on cloth. For how to read the marks in a print's margin, see how to read print edition marks.
What the Yun record says that others do not
Everything above is the record. What follows is interpretation specific to this artist.
The market starts in 1973. The same signature on a 1968 canvas and on a 1976 Umber-Blue is worth ten times more on the second, because the second is the work the reputation is built on. Yun began late, at 45, and painted for 34 years; the price list keeps that biography.
For a buyer the title does the job the date column should. K-artmarket rarely carries a year, but Umber-Blue on the label means the 1970s here, and the 1970s cost about three times as much as the 1990s at the same size. On an Untitled, the year on the catalogue entry or the stretcher is the first thing to find.
Paper is not the cheap way in that it is for other Dansaekhwa painters. It sells at about half of cloth because it is oil, not drawing.
The international reputation and the saleroom records sit in different places. Collections in London and Chicago and gallery representation in New York have not produced a confirmed foreign auction result above 300 million won.
What this does and does not tell you
The record supports a few plain statements. A 1970s Umber-Blue costs about three times a later canvas of the same size. Work from before 1973 is priced as a different thing. Oil on paper sits at half of cloth. The rise in the yearly median is a change in what was offered, not in what a given painting is worth.
It does not tell you the value of any one painting. Six 1970s canvases are not a price series, the dating rests on a registration number that matched in four checks out of five, and two lots at the top, the Umber Ble in the Newsis report and Christie's 2016 Umber-Blue 7-IIII-75, are missing the one figure that would matter most. The catalogue entry for the individual lot, with its year and its provenance, is where any real decision starts.