A young woman at the center of attention lately is Sul Park, a contemporary ink wash artist that has been steadily building up a technique that expresses natural imagery and inspirations of sentiment and emotion by combining traditional brush strokes of mainly ink wash painting and contemporary formative art styles. She began with acquiring basic brush stroke skills, moving on to landscape painting, and even muninhwa (a genre of Korean paintings done by non-artists, such as cultured scholars, aristocrats, etc to express their intentions) which broadened the spectrum of her brush stroke techniques.

Recently Park has been focusing on contemporary ink wash landscapes and producing oversized grand landscapes. While the artist may have had her roots in the realistic depiction approach, she soon began focusing on the emotional depiction of Mother Nature as oversized laconic works using semi-abstract expressions. Her artistic scope combines the poetic delivery of Asian painting with the introspective aesthetic sense of ink wash art, giving birth to a truly unique perspective. By using stereology and shadowing techniques in a collage format, drawn in a laconic manner with the reserved color black in repetitive, delicate and detailed strokes, Park accentuates the inherent internal identity of the subject matter. In her recent works, she applies various sketches originating from imaginative compositions to produce a dynamic display.

The artist attempts to capture nature’s vital and energetic beauty in a distinguished manner by often adopting a light and dark expressive technique to emphasize volume, used together with black ink and short edges. Such unique factors of Park’s work serves as crucial evidence in assessing her idiosyncratic artistic personality. Park’s ink wash landscape pieces like A Certain Landscape aptly illustrates her artistic inclinations while in another one of her representative works Capturing a Scene, the marriage between the simple color black and stylish strokes in a simplified composition shows well his characteristic expressive style.

by Chang Young Jun / Senior Curator (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)