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Park Rehyun did not build her career around one recognizable style. She began with precisely composed figure paintings, found a new visual language in markets and ordinary life, moved into bold abstraction, and later took up tapestry and printmaking. Each change opened another way of thinking about what Korean painting could be.
Born in 1920, Park studied painting in Tokyo during Japanese colonial rule. After Korea’s liberation, she confronted a difficult artistic question: how could she make work that felt contemporary and Korean without simply repeating either her Japanese training or older painting conventions? Her answers kept changing. She worked with ink, color, Korean paper, cloth, copper plates, found forms, and the physical knowledge of handwork.
Begin with the structure
Before deciding what an image represents, notice how Park divides the surface. Where do figures, shapes, and empty areas press against one another?
Watch what happens to the paper
Look for places where color sinks in, spreads, pools, or seems to remain on the surface. How does the behavior of the material affect the image?
Follow the recurring shapes
Circles, bands, masks, grains, vessels, bodily curves, and fragments appear across her later work. Do they read as objects, symbols, or simply forms?
Notice where painting begins to resemble handwork
Some images feel woven, pressed, layered, cut, or assembled. What changes when a painting begins to carry the logic of textiles or printmaking?
Look at the empty areas
Park sometimes leaves large spaces open and sometimes fills the surface with tightly connected forms. Where does your attention rest in each kind of composition?
Compare the decades
Look at an early figurative painting and a later abstraction. What disappears? What remains in the color, rhythm, treatment of bodies, or organization of space?
A screen can reveal the remarkable range of Park’s work. You can move quickly between the calm geometry of her figures, the pale colors of her market scenes, the dense bands of her abstractions, and the layered imagery of her prints. Online viewing is especially useful for noticing how thoroughly she reinvented her work.
A screen cannot fully convey the fibers of Korean paper, the way ink settles into or resists its surface, the pressure left by a printing plate, or the weight and looseness of woven material. It also compresses paintings more than two meters tall into the same rectangle as a small print.
These first prompts are for looking now. When the exhibition opens, I’ll share a second set created for looking in person.
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Looking now:
Find one figurative work and one abstract work. What visual habit seems to connect them?
Choose one repeated color and follow where it leads your eye.
Look closely at the edges of forms. Are they brushed, stained, printed, cut, or woven?
When the exhibition opens, I’ll offer in-person prompts with Park Rehyun's work.
The goal isn't one look — it's real time with the work, noticing what changes, and talking about it afterward.
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I can't find any sources of RM referencing Park Rehyun though she is mentioned in the SFMOMA press release for the exhibtion that her work will be part of the exhibit. Collecting Park might mean making room for a Korean modernist whose career crossed categories: traditional and experimental, painting and craft, domestic life and international exchange, representation and abstraction.
Park’s work opens a larger history than the better-known story of Korean monochrome painting. Her colors can be pale, earthen, blackened, or startlingly red and yellow. It shows modernism not as one international style arriving in Korea, but as a continuing process of questioning, adapting, and making something particular from many sources.
Read more: RMXSF MOMA Press Release
When was she supposed to paint?
In a 1948 essay, Park described days consumed by washing diapers, preparing meals, cleaning, caring for children and chickens, receiving visitors, and falling asleep from exhaustion. Her account ends with the practical question beneath much of her career: when was she supposed to find time for her primary work, painting?
Thirty years between solo exhibitions
Park held her first solo exhibition in 1946. Her next came in 1974, after decades in which much of her work was shown through exhibitions shared with her husband, the painter Kim Kichang. She learned lip-reading and acted as an interpreter for her hearing-impaired husband, yet public attention repeatedly positioned her as his wife rather than as an independent artist.
Success did not make her settle
In 1956 Park received two Presidential Awards, one for Early Morning and another for Open Stalls. Rather than consolidate that successful style, she continued moving toward abstraction, new materials, and more experimental processes.
The world entered the work
Travel through Asia, the United States, Europe, Africa, and Latin America exposed Park to new abstraction, archaeological objects, masks, textiles, and craft traditions. These encounters entered her work as bands, circles, repeating forms, and dense arrangements rather than as straightforward depictions of particular objects or places.
At nearly fifty, a beginner again
Park went to New York and spent years studying tapestry and demanding copperplate-printing techniques at the Pratt Graphic Art Center and Robert Blackburn’s workshop. She produced roughly one hundred prints, returned to Korea with printing equipment, and began combining what she had learned with Korean paper and ink painting. Her death from cancer in 1976 interrupted this new phase only two years after her return.
Park's work was seen in the West through joint, touring, or international survey exhibitions:
1964–1965: United States touring exhibitions. Park and her husband, Kim Kichang, held joint exhibitions in Honolulu, New York, and Washington, D.C. MMCA records that her 1963 painting In the Forgotten History was shown on this tour under the English title Fantasy of Yellow.
1967: São Paulo Biennial. Park represented South Korea at the major international biennial in Brazil, showing work including Glory.
New York, approximately 1969–1974: She lived and worked there while studying tapestry and printmaking, including at Robert Blackburn’s workshop.
2022–2023: 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh. Her 1971 prints Dawn and Retrospection were shown posthumously at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
GO DEEPER: WATCH
Park Rehyun retrospective: Triple Interpreter, a curator-guided exhibition tour
An official MMCA tour that places Park’s early figure paintings, domestic-life subjects, abstraction, tapestry, and printmaking into a single career-long sequence. This is the most useful video introduction to the artist and her 2020 centennial retrospective.
Park Rehyun, Open Stalls, 1956 MMCA lecture
An MMCA collection lecture centered on Open Stalls, one of Park’s pivotal paintings, useful for seeing how an everyday market scene became a testing ground for modern composition, color, and Korean ink painting.
GO DEEPER: READ/EXPLORE
Read more: MMCA Park Rehyun Triple Interpreter Webpage
Read more: Carnegie Mellon Museum of Art: Park Rehyun
Read more: Spotlight: Park Rehyun