Busan, b. 1998

Park Younghwan has sustained a painting practice grounded in the tradition of East Asian landscape painting, combining imagination with architectural composition. Through variations of ink on hanji including cheongmeok (bluish ink) and dameok (dense, fully-loaded ink) he lends subtle chromatic strata to black-and-white surfaces, juxtaposing nature and geometric form, figures and symbols, within a single scene. Perfect black spheres, Western buildings in modern styles, tangled stands of trees, and figures recalled from memory all find their place on the picture plane, where a fictive order and the artist’s personal temporality are realised simultaneously within the landscape. The sphere (gu), the artist’s basic unit, appears as the most emblematic object in the work, distributed across the surface in differing sizes and gradations of ink as though tracing the arc of elapsed time. It becomes, at once, the artist himself present in the many times and spaces of a life’s journey and the record of a process moving toward the most ideal form of living to which he aspires.