[Gallery Walk] From Masterpieces to Love Letters... Exploring the Human Side of Park Su-geun

Largest Exhibition Ever at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
Includes 174 Oil Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings
100 Items of Scrapbooks, Sketches, Postcards, and More
Late Chairman Lee Geonhee's Donated Items Also Presented to the Public for the First Time

Park Soo-keun's 'Tree and Two Women', 1962, oil on canvas, 130x89cm, Leeum Museum of Art.

[Asia Economy Reporter Donghyun Choi] "I am a painter. My only possessions are my brush and palette. If you agree to marry me, life will be difficult materially. However, I am confident that I can make you happier than anyone else spiritually. (...) Will you become the wife of a great artist?"

This is a proposal letter sent by the "People's Painter" Park Soo-keun (1914?1965) to his wife Kim Bok-soon. In 1936, Park Soo-keun fell in love at first sight with Kim Bok-soon, who lived upstairs in Geumseong, Gangwon (currently in North Korea). However, at that time, Kim Bok-soon was already engaged to a doctor’s family in Chuncheon according to her parents' wishes. Nevertheless, Park Soo-keun did not give up and passionately courted her by sending love letters. When Park Soo-keun fell ill from lovesickness, even his father intervened to negotiate with Kim Bok-soon’s family. Finally, Park Soo-keun succeeded in marrying her in 1940 at the age of twenty-seven.

After marriage, Park Soo-keun lived between Pyongyang and Geumseong during their newlywed life. However, happiness was short-lived as the Korean War broke out in June 1950, forcing Park Soo-keun to be separated from his wife. Since he had helped the South Korean army by painting, he had to flee south first to escape the pursuing North Korean army. Later, his wife also successfully defected to the South with their two children. After many hardships, they dramatically reunited in 1952 in Changsin-dong, Seoul.

Park Soo-keun's 'Shanty House', late 1950s, oil on paper, 20.4x26.6cm, Sungshin Women's University Museum.

This is like a story from a drama. Park Soo-keun reunited with his family and settled in the shantytown of Changsin-dong, where he began working full-time as an artist. The period from 1952 to 1963, when he made a living through painting in Changsin-dong, was the peak of his career as a painter. Was it the harsh life that awakened his artistic spirit, or the desperate struggle of a poor artist responsible for his family? Most of Park Soo-keun’s representative works such as "Woman Pounding Grain (1954)," "Tree and Two Women (1962)," and "Girl Carrying a Baby (1962)" were created during this time.

The exhibition "Bare Trees Waiting for Spring," which offers a comprehensive look at Park Soo-keun’s life, is currently held at the Deoksugung branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). This is the first solo exhibition of Park Soo-keun since the opening of the MMCA and the largest Park Soo-keun exhibition ever held. A total of 174 works including oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings by Park Soo-keun, along with 100 materials such as scrapbooks, sketches, and postcards collected by the artist himself from magazines and paintings, are on display. Yoon Bum-mo, director of the MMCA, said, "This Park Soo-keun retrospective is probably a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition. It comprehensively covers various works by era, subject, and technique from the artist’s early years to his final days."

Overview of the exhibition hall for Park Soo-keun retrospective "Bare Trees Waiting for Spring" set up at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Deoksugung.

Park Soo-keun is beloved for his Korean and commoner-style painting. When closely observing his paintings, the rough texture (mati?re) reminiscent of the mud walls of thatched houses or stone carvings of Buddha statues stands out. Park Soo-keun repeatedly layered paint horizontally, letting it dry to some extent, then layered it vertically to create color layers. When the paint clumped, he formed the outline of the subject and later added lines. He only graduated from elementary school and studied painting self-taught.

Around the 1960s, Western abstract art rapidly entered Korea. The exhibition shows records of Park Soo-keun regularly purchasing Japanese magazines such as "Mizue" and "Misulsucheop" while frequenting Myeongdong, and scrapbooking "Yanghwajib" (Western painting books). There are also traces of him copying works by Cubist painters like Picasso and Fernand L?ger. He also separately collected art terms and paintings by Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, and Modigliani. Kim Ye-jin, a curator at the MMCA who planned this exhibition, advised, "Park Soo-keun tried to incorporate Western modernism and abstract expressionism into his work. I hope visitors focus on how the artist strategically found intersections between his intended painting direction and the mainstream of the time."

Park Soo-keun's 'Yellow Croaker on a Cutting Board', 1952, 18x24.2cm, oil on hardboard, private collection.

Park Soo-geun (right) and his family.

Women and trees frequently appear in Park Soo-keun’s paintings. The women engaged in hard labor and the leafless trees in his paintings are self-portraits of Koreans who endured the cold and hunger of the post-war era with bare bodies. Park Soo-keun mainly depicted street scenes and neighbors he encountered while going back and forth between his home in Changsin-dong, the US Army PX in Myeongdong, and the Bando Gallery in Euljiro. He also painted several works modeled on his wife and daughter.

This exhibition also includes works that have never been publicly shown before: 19 pieces including 7 oil paintings and 12 original illustrations. Among them, three works?"Village Landscape," "Mountain," and "Three Women"?were donated by the late Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung Group. The 1962 work "Conversation of the Elderly" was purchased by Joseph Lee (1918?2009), a professor at the University of Michigan, when he visited Korea with graduate students in 1962. The existence of this work was unknown until it was donated to the University of Michigan Museum of Art after Joseph Lee’s passing and then publicly revealed.