Park Rehyun, Ink Abstraction in Postwar Korea

This paper explores the intersection of gender and medium in postwar Korea through a focused study of the artist Park Rehyun (1920–1976). In the turbulent years after the Korean War, artistic materials and forms were not neutral choices but were deeply entangled with the politics of decolonization, nation-building, and Cold War geopolitics. As a prominent female artist trained in both traditional ink painting and nihonga (Japanese painting), Park navigated a particularly complex terrain, confronting debates over the national identity of ink painting as well as an institutional art world that imposed restrictive gendered expectations on women. The paper traces Park’s dynamic artistic trajectory: her early engagement with cubist-inflected paintings of the 1950s, her subsequent shift toward abstraction, and her later incorporation of techniques and motifs from textiles and crafts. It examines how her evolving relationship with color, ink, and texture intersects with existing narratives of ink painting, which often prioritize a teleological move toward monochrome abstraction within ethno-nationalist discourse. By closely analyzing her material practice, the study considers the strategies Park employed to construct a distinctive artistic identity. It asks what possibilities and limitations her experimentation with form offered a woman artist seeking a voice beyond the confines of state-sanctioned femininity and the dominant, masculine lineages of ink painting. Rather than providing a linear account of stylistic change, the paper seeks to explore how her transmedial practice opens broader questions about medium, gender, and cultural identity in twentieth-century Korea and East Asia.