Biography

박래현 

朴崍賢, Park ReHyun

Park Re-hyun (1920-1976) is one of the first modern artists in Korea, having studied at the Women's Academy of Fine Arts in Tokyo in the early 1940s and holding her first solo exhibition in 1946. However, her second solo exhibition was about 30 years later in 1974, when she presented her works with her husband Kim Ki-chang.

Park studied art in Tokyo during the Japanese occupation of Korea, but pursued modern and abstract painting and print combining Korean traditional elements. While studying in Japan, Park won the Governor's Award for her painting "Make-up" in the 1943 Joseon Art Exhibition. Park continued to explore her own path, contemplating on the Korean beauty and the Western modern art, winning presidential awards for "Early Morning" and "Open Stalls" in 1956.

She visited Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan in 1960, witnessing the tide of abstract art in the art scene. In 1964 and 1965, Park and Kim held couple exhibitions in the U.S. and traveled around the U.S., Europe and Africa, where Park discovered the beauty of indigenous craftworks and ancient artifacts from various regions.

After the Sao Paulo Biennial, Park traveled Latin America and headed to New York to further study printmaking and tapestry. She studied the technique of simultaneous multicolor printing on copperplate prints, which became popular back then. After mastering printmaking techniques, Park showed her interest in the formativeness of negative space by cutting copperplates into the various shapes.

Her second and last solo exhibition during her lifetime was her homecoming exhibition to Korea in 1974. Bringing printmaking materials with her, Park experimented with printmaking combined with ink-and-wash painting, which was unconventional.