Engaged with Traditional Korean Art

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Korean art offers a distinct set of models: Goryeo celadon with its inlaid cranes, the plain white ‘moon jars’ of the Joseon dynasty, folding screens of books and scholarly objects known as chaekgeori, patchwork wrapping cloths (bojagi) and ink painting. In the 18th century Jeong Seon painted real Korean mountains rather than idealised Chinese ones, as in Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang (1751), and his ‘true-view’ approach remains a touchstone.

Modern painters folded these models into abstraction. Kim Whanki painted moon jars in the 1950s, and the Dansaekhwa painters of the 1970s, among them Park Seo-bo and Chung Sang-hwa, built monochrome surfaces through repeated marking, soaking or scraping, often on hanji paper or hemp. Kimsooja turned bedcover bundles, or bottari, into sculpture and performance, Suh Jeong Min rolls strips of used calligraphy paper into dense reliefs, and Park Dae-sung returns to the ink landscape at monumental scale.