Revisiting the Museum SAN collection: Raehyun Park

About the Exhibition

Park Re-hyun is an artist who drove the expansion of formal language in modern and contemporary Korean art by moving fluidly between painting and printmaking. Having received a modern art education while studying in Japan, she initially presented figurative paintings that delicately captured people and everyday life, but through her experiences abroad around the 1960s, exposure to international art trends and the visual cultures of various civilizations gradually shifted her work toward abstract structures and symbolic forms. This shift intensified further during her printmaking studies in the United States from 1969 to 1974. Exploring various printmaking techniques such as photo-etching, aquatint, and collagraphy, she actively introduced repetition, chance, and the physical properties of materials into her pictures, building an independent formal language that went beyond painting-centered expression. This exhibition surveys, in stages, the process by which Park Re-hyun's formal language formed and expanded — from works of the transitional period toward abstraction, through the period when abstract painting became fully established, to the print works where various experiments took place.