Man Je

Manjae (Park Juhyun) has devoted his painting practice to a single, inexhaustible subject: the dokkaebi, Korea's indigenous supernatural being. Rather than merely depicting this trickster spirit, his large-scale acrylic paintings make its sinmyo (神妙) — the quality of being at once numinous and unfathomable — directly available to the senses. Densely packed canvases teem with all things in creation: mythic animals and plants, East Asian architectural motifs, machines and airplanes, and crowds of figures whose status, dress, and gesture each hint at their own symbolism, dispersed across the picture without a single center.