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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.
What was happening in the world while they were becoming an artist? Explore the history.
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?
Taking in art does not have to happen all at once.
Looking now is about what is in front of you: what catches your eye, what changes as you move closer or farther away, what you notice when you give the work more than a quick glance.
Looking later is about what stays with you. A color. A shape. A question. Something you did not fully understand in the gallery but find yourself thinking about afterward.
The prompts below are not meant to tell you what to see. They are simply ways to spend a little more time with the work, and to notice what it might open up for you.
Looking now:
-Look for a place where the work seems to hover between something recognizable and something abstract. What keeps shifting as you look?
-Choose one color and follow it through the work. Where does it pull your eye, and where does it let go?
-Move closer to the surface. Look at the edges of forms and marks. Do they feel brushed, stained, printed, cut, layered, or something else?
-Notice where the work feels dense and where it opens up. What changes between those two kinds of space?
-RM says the painting reminds him of a boat or yacht. What do you see before being offered his suggestion? Once you imagine a boat, can you return to seeing only shapes and colors?
Looking later:
-What part of the surface do you remember most clearly: a color, a texture, an edge, a shape?
-Did the work feel more orderly or more unruly than you expected?
-As you move through the exhibition, where else do you notice an artist using material itself to carry meaning?
-What does it mean to remain an artist when almost every demand around you asks you to be something else?
RM's words from the SFMOMA zine, from the Passion section, page 14-15: "There are artists who spent an entire lifetime pushing themselves forward, regardless of the world's response....Or Park Rehyun, who lived as a wife, as an interpreter, for her husband who had a hearing disability, and as a painter, calling herself a "triple interpreter." RM writes more and concludes, "But there is one thing I came to understand. Every time they could have stopped, they chose not to."
In the exhibition's Passion gallery, RM speaks about Park Rehyun with remarkable admiration. She raised four children, served as an interpreter for her hearing-impaired husband, the painter Kim Kichang, and continued developing her own artistic world.
RM says he personally prefers Park's paintings to her husband's and is astonished by what she accomplished under such demanding circumstances. Her dedication makes him reflect on his own life and how much further he might push himself as an artist.
For RM, Park represents more than artistic achievement. Her life is evidence of what a person can create through persistence, experimentation, and commitment to something deeply their own.
When I first got to see this exhibit, it was during the opening celebration and after RM shared a few words. Immediately, we went up to the galleries and got a first look at the 8 rooms in about 40 minutes. Not long. Since I knew my time would be abbreviated, I went through, with the initial goal of getting my own sense of what had been curated, taking pictures of works that grabbed me from the outset, knowing I will return to them. Though brief, what struck me about this room, Passion, was the depth of experiences and perspectives the artists drew from. Most of the artists in this room are women such as Rhee Seundja, Ruth Asawa, Park, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Shinja, Kim Yun Shin, Georgia O'Keefe and more. I look forward to returning to notice more.
Source: RM x SFMOMA zine
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
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