Fancy Imaginations at Work

Painter mesmerizes viewers with his abstract landscape paintings

Painter Park Kang-chung's studio is no different from those of other painters. Its windows are closed, located in the middle of large buildings in downtown Seoul where the moon is hardly seen. But he has been turning out paintings of mountains, sun, rivers and forests, like a traditional painter of mountains and rivers. He comes to the studio looking just like any office worker in the morning and works in the studio where there is nothing to help him paint outdoor scenery like mountains, rivers and forests. There are no photos and printed matters for him to look at to paint what he has been painting so long; mountains, rivers, forests, sun and moon. He has many of those paintings stacked up against the wall of the studio. Under such situation, he has been painting mountains and rivers in an abstract style.
His mountains are not really mountains because they came out of his imagination can only be called such in broad categorical terms.
His paintings are quite different from the traditional paintings of mountains and rivers called "Sansu Hwa"expressed in very precise terms in colors and forms. They are full of mysterious colors and spaces giving out the sensations of moving with awesome colors and deadly quietness. At times, they look like things magnified with magnifying lenses and at times look like something out of outer space caught by telescopic lenses. Painter Park paints those things without the help of photos and making trips to outdoors. Overall, his art pieces hide his creativity because they look like customary landscape paintings.
Therefore, his works waving color and lightness through his whole screen with different imaginative vibration and stillness to the general landscape's formation and paragraph lead to our eyes to contemplate imagination courteously.
Before he paints, he usually stares at white canvas long as much as over several days holding easel. With his affection for painting, he gets to find possible images, which are needed on the canvas.
He reverses to paint a space in which subtle lightness and color at last covered and covered like supplementation of breathing each phase and partial with formatting of meditative image as if zoomed up leaves and truck formation on his landscapes.
These behaviors of his art as good as painting such as step-by-by course's expanding way at stopping moment to moment with oil dyes as to paradoxically spreading ink on the paper of Oriental paints.
The painter trusts his eyes and hands that are helpless to the camera lens with his heart that is his confidence of landscape blown out like a symbol.
He is a graduate of Seoul National University Fine Arts College and Hong Ra-hee, the wife of Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee and president of the Leeum Museum of Art was in the same class with Park at SNU Fine Art College. nw

East Village Thoughts; 72.7 x 91.0 cm; Oil on Canvas; 2001

Woman; 53 x 45.5 cm; Oil on Canvas; 2000

Painter Park Kang-chung