작업 소개

57STUDIO는 국립현대미술관의 열린강좌 프로그램 중 미술관 소장품 강좌 시리즈를 제작하였습니다. 윤범모 관장이 직접 작품을 설명하는 형식으로 구성하였으며, 실제 교육 현장에서 효과적인 학습 자료로 활용될 수 있도록 제작되었습니다. 또한, 어느 장면을 캡처하더라도 교육 자료로서의 기능이 충실히 전달될 수 있도록 화면을 구성하였습니다. 이 시리즈는 작가 12명의 작품을 조명하며, 매주 수요일 YouTube LIVE를 통해 공개되었습니다.

57STUDIO produced the Museum Collection Lecture Series as part of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s (MMCA) open lecture program. The series was structured in a format where Director Yoon Bum-mo personally explains each artwork, ensuring its effectiveness as a valuable educational resource for use in learning environments.

The videos were designed so that every frame could function as an informative material, regardless of where it was captured. This series highlights the works of 12 artists and was released weekly via YouTube LIVE every Wednesday.

Park Rehyun, Open Stalls, 1956

Today, we will take a look at Open Stalls (1956) by artist Park Rehyun (pen name: Uhyang). As you can see, it is quite large. The work made a dazzling appearance on the 1950s art scene with its new, innovative style.

Park, one of the most talented women artists of the mid-20th century, studied Japanese painting in Japan during the colonial period. Typical characteristics of Japanese traditional figure painting can be seen in the way she has omitted a sense of specific, realistic site or space, and used secondary colors in portraying the women. Despite her educational background, Park’s painting style changed completely as Korea went through liberation, division and war.

As you know, Park Rehyun was married to renowned artist “Unbo” Kim Kichang. The retrospective of “Uhyang” Park Rehyun, held at MMCA, Deoksugung, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth, was an opportunity to rediscover her qualities, which had been overshadowed by her husband’s popularity. Since Unbo was hearing-impaired, Park Rehyun was his interpreter on overseas trips, translating English to Korean, and Korean to, lip-reading, enabling him to communicate so that his world of art could flourish. She was a woman of iron will. This background explains the title Triple Interpreter. Every year, Unbo and Uhyang held couple exhibitions introducing their artistic achievements to the world. It was an unusual activity for an artist couple.

In the early years of her career, Park presented mostly human figures in her art, but in the late 1960s she made a transition to abstract painting. At first glance her forms resemble the shapes of ‘brass coin’ or the ‘straw mats’ used for millstones, but I believe they symbolize life and vitality. Her picture-planes capture the depth of her heart as a mother. So I think the band-shaped forms can be seen as “bands of life,” which the artist expressed in a series of abstract paintings. Viewed today as well, the bands of life remain vivid, in a style that makes one feel they could have been painted yesterday in the most advanced mode of contemporary art. While in New York, Park experimented with printmaking. Studying new printmaking techniques, she produced numerous works that were unique in both technique and contents, even by today’s standards. Unfortunately, she left us relatively few of her works, due to the fact that she had to balance her demanding life with her art. It is lamentable that only about 200 works remain, and not 2,000. Though her oeuvre is not large, each of her works is a gem, from the earliest one to the last,all of them carrying powerful stories. I think the true qualities of Park’s world of art lie in their diversity, from sense of subject to coloring, technique, form and content.

The MMCA Deoksugung exhibition demonstrates how important it is to rediscover the art of Park Rehyun amidst the new developments of 20th century Korean art, particularly through the work Open Stalls, from the MMCA collection―a prize-winning work at a National Competition. There is a street vendor with a cart, and women holding baskets of goods, among them one who is carrying a baby on her back. Behind them we see modern style buildings. The artist has interpreted the theme in a novel manner, by making new choices of background and subjects. The women are the main subjects, and they convey an exotic appearance with their tall, slender figures, and long necks, arms and legs, drawn in somewhat exaggerated proportions. Though it is a scene of everyday life, the figures in the painting are a symbolic representation of the new world pursued by Park Rehyun.

Park interpreted the human figures mainly through fields of color. While traditional-style painting was achieved through lines, using brush strokes in traditional ink-wash, the main characteristic of this work is its use of lightly applied colors, integrating human figures and background architecture in a composition based on solid shapes and fields of color. The older family in the back, the buildings constructed in straight lines in the background, and the figures of curved shapes in the foreground form a diverse compositional scheme, showing contrasts between straight and curved lines, contrasts among different colors, proportional balance between the figures on the left and the background on the right, dynamic contrast, and combinations of elements. In my opinion, this is her most representative work from the 1950s. Not only as a woman artist representing the 20th century, but as a leading Korean artist, Park Rehyun definitely merits reillumination, and this painting can be seen as the evidence.