Park Soo Keun: The Naked Tree Awaiting Spring

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea is proud to present Park Soo Keun: The Naked Tree Awaiting Spring, a retrospective exhibition of the artist often called “Korea’s favorite painter.” Widely discussed and analyzed in art textbooks, Park Soo Keun’s life and works are already quite familiar to most Koreans. But in spite of (or perhaps, because of) his great popularity and the soaring prices of his works, Park Soo Keun has been at the center of controversy relating to possible forgery. Therefore, the Korean government recently supported a huge research project to conclusively identify and document Park Soo Keun’s entire oeuvre, which was carried out from 2016 to 2018.

Based on the results of this project, including newly researched works, this exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea significantly expands the size and diversity of Park Soo Keun’s art. From some of his earliest paintings, produced while he was still a teenager, to the final images he painted just before his death at the age of fifty-one, the exhibition features around 170 total works, including oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, frottages, and illustrations.

The paintings that Park Soo Keun submitted to the National Art Exhibition of Korea are characterized by simple lines, rough textures, and calm shades of grayish green. With their restrained but genuine forms, his landscape and figure paintings were viewed as Western oil paintings with a Korean sensibility, evoking the traditional aesthetics of stone Buddhist sculptures, Joseon ceramics, and rough window paper. With their scenes of everyday life in postwar Korea—including Park’s favorite themes of children playing in the streets, old people chatting, and women street vendors—these works became extremely popular as souvenirs for foreign visitors. With the subsequent growth of the domestic economy and rapid urbanization of Seoul, Park’s works were avidly sought by Koreans nostalgic for the bygone era, until they became the most expensive paintings by any Korean artist.

With notable contributions from Park Wansuh, the acclaimed novelist who documented postwar life for ordinary Koreans, and Han Youngsoo, the photographer who captured the transformation of Seoul after serving as a student soldier during the Korean War, this exhibition closely examines the full spectrum of Park Soo Keun’s art. Our hope is that visitors will newly encounter Park Soo Keun, the artist who so memorably expressed the postwar era through his simple but sublime images of ordinary people.