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A Unique World of Painting Where Literature

and Poetic Quality Gently Flow

Jang Jun-seok Art Critic·Director of the Korean Institute of Art Criticism

The painter Kwon Sook-ja has tirelessly endeavored to plastically render her feelings and thoughts about nature and
humanity. She has never exaggerated her artistic world for outward show, nor strived for the fame or achievement
of an artist, nor simply followed prevailing trends. She has steadfastly pursued a simple artistic world, expressing her
inner self purely through plastic forms. Furthermore, as an educator, she has nurtured talent through art education in
university lecture halls. Kwon Sook-ja’s life, walking a single path as a painter and educator for over 40 years, can be
described as a life of freedom and passion as an artist.

In 2015, fulfilling a long-cherished wish, she founded an art museum with her own private funds for the cultural devel-
opment of the Yongin area and for its residents. The Angeli Art Museum, built over several years and infused with her
artistic soul and sweat, is an institution with a unique plastic form, rich in the literary quality that, along with its pictori-
al quality, was expressed from her inner self, as if creating a single work of art. Much like Michelangelo or Leonardo da
Vinci, her passion for art has given birth to a beautiful museum that shares the same atmosphere as her own artworks.

Like the museum, Kwon Sook-ja’s artistic plasticity is thought to be the result of relentless effort following her art
major. Recognized for her artistic talent from a young age, the artist seriously contemplated and depicted subjects
such as nature, people, and animals during her university years. She began painting in a literary style, allowing for
communication and rapport, and her early paintings possessed a remarkable density and unique pictorial quality.
The expressive power stemming from the artist’s extraordinary artistic temperament and lyricism resulted in original
paintings that were never merely an imitation of any art historical school. Over the subsequent 40 years, a unique
plastic beauty, like a pure lyric poem incorporating various subjects from life and nature, has flowed consistently and
gently through her work. The artist’s pure aesthetic imagination, imbued with lyricism and poetic quality, either uni-
fies with various natural life forms—such as long-necked birds, deer, fish, sun and stars, and mountains and fields—or
constructs forms that express an inner illusion that encapsulates love, despair, sorrow, joy, and anger through human
figures, particularly women.

When she held her first exhibition while working as a teaching assistant at her alma mater, her mentor, Professor Kim
Chang-rak, emphasized the prominent literary quality of her work, a highly sharp and accurate assessment. Sub-
sequently, the plastic sensibility revolving around the theme of nature, which developed in the 1990s, was rooted
in continuous contemplation and her literary imagination stemming from her own life. Furthermore, like a serious
conversion to religion, the harmony between mountains, fish, the sun, and the moon with people, achieved through
earnest self-reflection on her inner self and the true form of nature, emerged as a major concern for the artist. The
work A Walk Through This World – Nature and Couple simply depicts a naked man and woman riding a long-necked
deer that runs through overgrown wildflowers. This painting naturally leads viewers to various imaginings, which
will differ according to their state of mind. Seeing the couple clinging to the deer as if flying away might evoke the
image of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or perhaps the dream of an escape with a lover. The mysterious forms,
composition, and innate literary and pictorial qualities in the work convey a sense of freedom, ease, and purity rarely
found in other artists. This is regarded as a plastic beauty imbued with our own feelings and sensibilities—a richness,
comfort, and ease like a sanctuary in nature. The artist’s plastic capacity to incorporate such tendencies into her inner
self and condense them into a single painting is clearly very sensuous, emotional, and poetic.

Defining the human condition of our time—unfolding in conjunction with nature—as a situation marked by conflict,
sorrow, despair, longing, and salvation amidst the enormous changes since the year 2000, the artist, who has pictori-
ally expressed the internal changes, believed that expressing these tendencies was true creation.

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