Artists are no strangers to poverty. Great artists died in dire situations –- and despair about their own art. Vincent Van Gogh famously sold a single painting during his entire career. He died penniless and destitute, saying, “The sadness will last forever.” When Paul Gauguin died alone in poverty, he had no idea of the impact that his work would have on the art world.

I couldn’t but recall these stories of poignant irony on my recent visit to the Park Soo Keun Museum in Yanggu, Gangwon Province. At the otherwise desolate museum in the mountainous county bordering the Demilitarized Zone, changes were evident from the parking lot. There were dozens of cars parked and visitors brimming with expectations headed to the main hall that resembles a granite fortress. Indeed, online reservations for a slot in the 10-person per half-an-hour tours were not easy to attain, as most tours had been booked up.

My tour was prompted by memories of previous visits. I had found the museum was nicely built on a spacious scenic spot, but there were so few paintings by the artist to whom it was dedicated. The reason was self-evident. The county museum’s budget was too tiny to purchase works by Park Soo-keun, who is not only the most beloved but the most expensive Korean artist today.

Therefore, I wanted to witness the influence of the recent donation of 18 works by Park -- four oils and 14 sketches -- from the collection of the late Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee to the eponymous museum. The bequeathed works form part of an exhibition which opened on May 6, the 56th anniversary of Park’s death, and the number of daily visitors has soared tenfold, according to museum officials.

Park died of cirrhosis at the age of 51. For several years he had suffered from illnesses caused by psychological and financial stress, which he endured quietly. The self-taught artist achieved a certain degree of fame during his lifetime, but he never escaped poverty. His last words, “I assumed heaven was near, but it’s far, far away ...” seem to tell a lot about his untold hardships.

Nowadays, exhibitions of Park’s paintings draw large crowds, and his paintings fetch the highest prices per size among all Korean artists. But he had never exhibited his paintings before 1962, when a few American patrons organized his first -- and what would be the last -- solo exhibition, at the library of the US Air Force base in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province.

Among those patrons was Margaret Miller, the wife of a US diplomat, who actively promoted his work. Her support was obviously a ray of hope for Park, who was an outsider to the country’s elite art circle. With no more than an elementary school education, Park had no academic or regional connections in the art community. Whatever recognition he earned from the domestic art scene came only grudgingly, often with measures of condescension.

In an article contributed to the February 1965 issue of the US magazine, Designers West, Miller wrote:

“Sometimes compared in style to the Mexican artist, Diego Rivera, Mr. Park’s figures represent his love for the rusticity and his concept of simple men, women and children going about their daily lives. His sincerity, simplicity and economy of composition are remarkably mirrored in his art.

“Whatever his technique, there are always soothing qualities of Korean feeling in his paintings. There are times a viewer may feel as though he were leisurely sitting with this calm artist for whom art is an overtone of his inner psychological experiences. His subject matters are Korean to the core. His models are his own children, family and neighbors.”

In the same article, Park himself is quoted as saying, “I have a very simple view of art that I must draw the goodness and honesty of man. The images of people I paint are therefore simple and uncolorful. I like most to put down images of plain grandfathers and grandmothers in their homes – and, of course, the children.”

That was in the 1950s to the early 1960s. Bleak and destitute was the everyday scenery in postwar Korea, one of the poorest countries in the world. The nation was not only economically impoverished, but had yet to build self-esteem culturally and artistically. Most mainstream artists followed Western trends.

With no illustrious art school background, which meant he had no teacher or tradition to follow, Park worked alone to search for his own method. The result is what is widely acclaimed today as his “unique matiere and motifs,” the simple people rendered flat in bold strokes with a brush and knife upon layers -- eight on average -- of white and yellow-ochre paint and oil, dried in between.

Women carrying baskets on their heads, girls with babies on their backs, roadside vendors, children playing on a back street, elderly men sharing leisure time, laborers and figures beneath a quaint skeleton of a winter tree – these are the subjects Park repeatedly expressed on small pieces of hardboard or plywood. Art supplies were hard to come by.

In her debut novel “The Naked Tree,” Park Wan-suh describes how the narrator is shocked to find a painting of a quaint bare tree at the house of Ok Hui-do, her colleague and portrait painter at the PX of the US Army in wartime Seoul. “It was a monstrous tree without leaves or fruit, floating in almost achromatic, murky chaos, with neither skies nor ground, on a canvas of rugged texture.”

Park Wan-suh adamantly asserted that the novel, published in 1970, was fiction and the short affair between the narrator and the artist derived from her imagination. But she said, “I couldn’t give up my wish to bear witness to the life of an artist -– how he managed to keep painting and supporting his family, without going crazy or going nuts, or without even getting drunk, in the empty Seoul during the dark days of anxiety after the re-evacuation on Jan. 4, 1951.”


Lee Kyong-hee
Lee Kyong-hee is a former editor-in-chief of The Korea Herald. She is currently editor-in-chief of Koreana, a quarterly magazine of Korean culture and arts published by the Korea Foundation. -- Ed.