A Decade, Read Backwards

From 22 to 28 June 2016, Park Kyoung Mug held a solo exhibition at Gana Art Space in Insa-dong, Seoul. A short magazine feature by Lee Sang-gyun marked the occasion. Lee lists the subjects of the paintings, pines and plum blossom, cats and owls, in ink and colour on paper, and finds them alike and yet different. Entering the room, he writes, was like coming upon a scholar-painter of the late Joseon period. He notes Park's liking for beopgo changsin, the principle of drawing on the old to make the new.

Ten years later, the feature is worth reading again less for its account of the paintings than for what Park said about time.

Two of his remarks stand out (both translated from the Korean). "Just as an old tea is prized and tastes the better for its age, I paint with ten and twenty years in mind." "As standing water goes stale, an artist who stands still is left behind." He described preparing the next exhibition alongside the current one, so that the work would keep changing. He designed the mounting of his finished works himself and kept a digital record of everything he painted. Lee, in his own voice, describes Park as committed to an aesthetic of slowness, and predicts that he will keep to his own path for thirty or forty years.

These were statements of intention. The decade since makes it possible to read the work alongside them.

The pines, plum blossom, cats and owls gave way to rocks. In the series Still Breath Rock (mugam), Park built up ink in successive layers, the method he calls jeokmuk. The rock paintings were followed by paintings of vessels: first black, and by 2026 white, made in ground ink and slip on hanji. The subjects changed, and the materials widened.

Read backwards, the remark the decade tests most clearly is not the one about slowness but the one about standing still. The work since 2016 has changed its subject and its materials more than once. That does not show he foresaw where it would go. It shows that what he said in 2016 can now be set against a dated body of work, and that so far the work has not stood still. Of Lee's thirty or forty years, ten have passed; the rest remains open.

Lee also reports Park calling the time when work goes on show its "sale period." The same feature has him putting everything into the painting of the day so that its value will be recognised in ten or twenty years. The feature does not say how he held the two together, the exhibition as a time to sell and the painting as something whose worth is settled later. Ten years on, both remain on the record.

Park's work will be shown in London in KVAA's (mean)while, opening on 26 November 2026.