{"id":9944,"date":"2026-05-09T07:19:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T07:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/9944\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T07:19:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T07:19:06","slug":"the-korean-artist-park-daesung-is-in-the-spotlight-at-81","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/9944\/","title":{"rendered":"The Korean Artist Park Daesung Is In the Spotlight at 81"},"content":{"rendered":"

At nearly 81, the artist Park Daesung, considered by many to be the keeper of traditional hangukhwa painting, is having a bit of a celebrity moment. His large-scale ink landscape paintings of an almost mythical version of his country are part of recent, current and upcoming exhibitions, and he will be sponsored by Gana Art in Seoul at this year\u2019s TEFAF New York<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Park\u2019s works are part of \u201cKorean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art\u201d through July 5 at the Art Institute of Chicago<\/a>, a show that will move to the British Museum in London (tentatively set to open in September). He was also featured in \u201cKorean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared\u201d at the National Museum of Asian Art<\/a> in Washington, D.C., which ended in February, and in a major solo show in 2023 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/a>, which provoked interest among major museums from Berlin to Kazakhstan to Rome. Despite a lifetime of recognition in South Korea and abroad, this latest chapter has felt very much like a late-career renaissance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI came from nothing, and I\u2019ve accomplished some fame and a lot of good opportunities, but this feels very overwhelming,\u201d Park said during a recent interview in his Gyeongju studio, which is filled with decades of artwork. \u201cSometimes it feels like I\u2019m in a dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

Park\u2019s journey into the mountains and valleys of his homeland \u2014 and how he interprets those differently from all others with outsize and abstract objects rather than reverent and realistic depictions of nature and temples, pagodas, pottery and animals \u2014 is what has gained him a following for modernizing hangukhwa painting.<\/p>\n

On a recent spring afternoon, as South Korea\u2019s famous cherry blossoms were popping, Park talked in his studio in this southeastern city known for its medieval citadel.<\/a> Dozens of canvases \u2014 some finished, some not \u2014 are mounted side by side, taking up nearly every wall, much like they do in museums and galleries, dwarfing the viewer. Paintbrushes and inkwells, many the size of Mason jars, were scattered about, and flecks of ink were spattered about the floor. Dressed impeccably, with a light-blue scarf and khaki trousers, he spoke, through a translator, about the present fame he is enjoying, the ups and downs of his life and his hopes for the future.<\/p>\n

The Museums Special Section<\/p>\n

Born in nearby Cheongdo in 1945 as the Japanese were leaving the Korean Peninsula after 50 years of colonial presence and occupation, Park witnessed his father\u2019s killing at the hands of a Communist soldier in 1948. He had just lost his mother to a chronic illness, and he and his father were sleeping when guerrillas from the north raided their home as they swept south across the peninsula. Park\u2019s father was holding the 3-year-old when he was fatally struck with a sword, which also severed young Park\u2019s left arm just below the shoulder. Park was left for dead, but was discovered by a neighbor. The youngest of eight brothers and sisters, Park was raised by his eldest brother and his wife.<\/p>\n

That tragic event defined his life \u2014 and his art. Teased at school for his injury, he retreated into nature near the family farm and found solace in calligraphy and drawing, eventually becoming a pioneer in ink drawings that document the landscape of his country.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would help out my oldest brother and his wife by going out into the wilderness to collect wood, to bring back water and to do farming,\u201d he said. \u201cMy world became the landscape and the mountains. I spent a lot of time alone and really connecting to nature. The mountains shifted and changed with the seasons, and I began to paint them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the decades after the Korean War ended in 1953, Park married and had two daughters. He moved to the city of Daegu and eventually to Seoul before settling in Gyeongju about 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI began to paint more and more and became very much involved in the art scene in the 1970s, and I started to meet older artists, and I learned a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I have always had a desire to do something new and different. I wanted to make something my own, more contemporary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gana Art<\/a>, a major gallery in Seoul, will take four of Park\u2019s paintings to New York, all of which embody the kind of painting he made famous: hangukhwa, the traditional Korean method of ink painting on traditional mulberry paper, often with only minimal color flourishes and heavy on calligraphy of mostly Korean characters. But Park is known for turning hangukhwa on its head.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving calligraphy is normal in Asian painting, but Park writes it in his own style,\u201d Jung Lee, executive director of Gana Art, said in a recent interview over coffee at the sprawling gallery in the affluent Seoul neighborhood of Pyeongchang. \u201cIt\u2019s in Korean and Chinese, so people can still read it, but in traditional style artists follow the rules of the scales of the letters. But he plays with uppercase and lowercase. It\u2019s more of a drawing than just writing letters.\u201d<\/p>\n

This will be Park\u2019s debut at TEFAF New York (or any TEFAF fair), and he is the first artist that Gana Art signed when Jung\u2019s father, Lee Hojae, founded the gallery in 1983. The gallery will also take works to TEFAF by the sculptor Choi Jongtae<\/a> and the deceased painter Yoo Youngkuk<\/a>, both considered pioneers in South Korean avant-garde art.<\/p>\n

\u201cPark breaks all of the rules of what traditional painting used to be because even though it\u2019s scenery, he reimagines and re-sizes the images and what he sees as important,\u201d Jung said. \u201cTraditionally you would have a big mountain, and a valley and small houses. But he looks at objects and paints with his own imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

One painting going to TEFAF New York is \u201cBlue Mountain and White Cloud,\u201d which is a scaled-down version (45.7 inches by 28.7 inches) of a mural-size painting featured prominently in the solo show \u2014 among his first in the United States \u2014 at<\/a> LACMA in 2022-23. The massive four-layer mountain is rendered abstractly and dwarfs everything around it: two bright yellow orbs, a splash of clouds and sky, a pagoda at the base, crooked and quiet.<\/p>\n

For Jung, so much of South Korean art during Park\u2019s generation was rooted in modernism that challenged the military dictatorships that ruled this country for more than 30 years after the Korean War. Park was devoted to landscapes and calligraphy.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe never had that luxury of having two hands, and he never had an assistant, though his wife helped him sometimes,\u201d Jung said (Park has had a prosthetic arm for years). \u201cHe always was an outsider, and he was never with a political movement like many of the Korean painters of his generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

That connection to nature and his devotion to trying new approaches is what keeps Park focused on the future of South Korea, which he has seen emerge from the ashes of war to a global powerhouse of K-pop culture, electronics and wealth. It all comes back to nature: the world where he found solace and grace after early childhood tragedy.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can still see nature all around you and feel the soul of Korea, and that\u2019s never really changed,\u201d he said with the glimmer in his eye of a young boy. \u201cResilience is the most important word for me. It doesn\u2019t really matter what you have gone through because nature never changes. The mountains will be there forever.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At nearly 81, the artist Park Daesung, considered by many to be the keeper of traditional hangukhwa painting,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9945,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2839,974,7551,7553,31,7550,6218,7552,33],"class_list":["post-9944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-korea","tag-art","tag-content-type-personal-profile","tag-european-fine-art-fair","tag-gana-art-seoul","tag-korea","tag-museums","tag-new-york-city","tag-park-daesung-1945","tag-south-korea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}