Gana Art is holding the Park Soo-Keun Retrospective Exhibition at Gana Art Center in Insa-dong in celebration of the centennial of the birth of Park Soo-Keun, a representative artist of Korean modern art who is admired as a 'National Artist.' This exhibition is the largest exhibition ever held in Korea that shows 120 posthumous paintings of Park Soo-Keun, which include 90 oil paintings and 30 watercolor and drawings.

Park Soo-Keun (1914–1965) is regarded as an artist who had the most Korean and most unique characteristics in the modern and contemporary art history of Korea. What he drew was mostly the daily life of ordinary people, such as people in a marketplace, washerwomen by a stream, women pounding grain in a mortar, among others. Because of this kind of style, the paintings of Park are also an excellent record of the era he was a part of. In addition, the paintings of Park, which bear his own simple and deep emotion, were able to convey his thought on art – “I have a very ordinary philosophy on art and that is the goodness and faithfulness of a human being should be depicted in paintings.” 

The sentiment of Korean people at the time of Park Soo-Keun is contained in his paintings, leaving a great impression to people even today. We can feel the timeless sense of kinship from the figures drawn by Park through his warm eyes toward our neighbors and families during hard and difficult times. We expect that this exhibition will present the unchanging values of great art to modern people who lead their lives in the vortex of change and confusion in values.

*image (left)
© Soo Keun Park
courtesy of Gana Art