Park Kyoung Mug

Park Kyoung Mug works in hand-ground ink on hanji, Korean paper made from dak fibre, the inner bark of the paper mulberry. He is one of very few painters of his generation who still prepare their own ink, grinding an inkstick against a wet stone for hours before a session rather than working from bottled ink.

The discipline is not nostalgic. It is what the method requires: he grinds, paints, waits for the layer to dry, and begins again, five to ten times over, so that what reaches the paper is not the record of a single gesture but ink laid down over months. That method depends on the paper. Hanji is engineered for strength and for repeated wetting, and a sheet that survives being soaked and dried thirty times will take thirty layers of ink. The Korean term for the method is jeokmukbeop, accumulated ink. Layered ink is not a Korean invention and Park does not claim it as one; the claim is that it can be carried further on this paper than on any other.

Since his MFA at Hongik University in 2007 his subjects have stayed close to rock, coast and mountain, but the inquiry has been into duration rather than into landscape. Recent work extends in two directions at once: paintings on the surface of white porcelain forms, and a return into finished paintings of earlier years to work colour over them, so that a surface of 2023 now rests on one of 2020. He works with one hand, having lost his left arm in childhood. This is part of how the work is made rather than its subject. He has shown in Germany, Japan, Poland and the United Kingdom.