Park Kwang-Jin

Park Kwang-Jin (b. 1935, Seoul) holds a singular place in Korea’s postwar art history. A founding member of the Mokwoohoe (Figurative Art movement), he developed a practice that fused close observation with modernist form. While many of his Dansaekhwa contemporaries pursued monochrome abstraction through material process, Park sustained a commitment to figuration, forging what might be called a “parallel modernism” in which representation and abstraction coexist. His approach treated tradition not as something to preserve unchanged, but as something to transform. This is especially evident in his Sound of Nature series, where the silver grass fields of Jeju Island—his home since 2006—are distilled into spare, perceptual compositions that connect global abstraction with a strong sense of place.