[Gallery Walk] What Is the Person Lying in This Forest Looking At?

Park Gwangsu's Solo Exhibition "The Darkness of White Milk" Opens at Hakgojae with 21 Paintings
A Hometown Where Baby Teeth and Landmines Lie Buried Together, Memories Beneath Vivid Colors

Beneath a forest where teal and purple branches tangle together, a person lies stretched out. Grass shoots up beside the body, its ribs showing, while leaves and stems crowd above the yellow face. This is Park Gwangsu's painting "All Skies," and it seems that to see the sky, one would have to lie down like this person.

Park Gwangsu, “All Skies,” 2026, oil on canvas, 90.9 x 72.7 cm. A person lies stretched out beneath a dense, tangled forest. The growing plants contrast with the motionless figure. Hakgojae.

Twenty-one paintings are on view at "The Darkness of White Milk," a solo exhibition at Hakgojae in Samcheong-dong, Seoul. The figures in the eight-work series "All Skies" could be asleep, resting, or dead; it is impossible to tell. The plants around them grow in different directions, while the people remain still. Even as you take in the lush forest, the reclining body keeps drawing your eye.

In "The Smell of Burning Dry Plants," a blue figure stands with a bird cradled in its arms. In the sky above its head floats a brain-like shape, sending down lightning. After searching for people in the forest, you find that this time, things that have broken away from the body make up the landscape. The paintings are said to be based on the fields and trees of Cheorwon, where the artist spent his childhood, but they are far removed from the comfort one might expect when recalling the scenery of one's hometown.

Hearing about the summer days he remembers makes the paintings a little easier to understand. A child eating corn while sitting on a wooden platform heard that someone had died in a minefield. The hometown soil where he had buried a lost baby tooth still held mines that had yet to be found. "Cornfield," drawn from the resemblance between kernels of corn and teeth, and "Baby Tooth and Underground Tunnel," in which the small hole where he buried the tooth grows large enough to hold a human body, both emerged from these memories. Looking back on childhood as an adult brings with it things that were invisible to a child at the time.

Park Gwangsu, “Your Spirit,” 2026, oil on canvas. A large bird and a figure with their head raised emerge among tangled branches. Hakgojae.

Park Gwangsu is the artist who created the black-and-white animation in the music video for "Tomboy" by the band HYUKOH. Color has been added to the works he once made by layering countless black lines, and he fully embraced color painting at his 2023 solo exhibition at Hakgojae, "Copper and Hands." In these new works, waterways and plains open up beyond the dense branches. The forest has not grown any less lush. As a more distant landscape extends beyond the forms that once held the viewer's gaze, the eye moves between the nearby leaves and the land farther away.

The inspiration came from a thicket in Cheorwon that the artist revisited while preparing for the exhibition. After trying for some time to bring order to his canvases, he saw branches growing bent and tangled and asked himself why he should insist on putting the paintings in order. He applied paint, rubbed and scraped it away, then covered it again. Even when a line already painted is erased, traces remain beneath the next layer of color. The way an earlier scene persists and intrudes into a new one resembles how other memories can suddenly surface when recalling something from long ago.

That is why these paintings cannot be fully understood from a distance, by color alone. Up close, the bright areas reveal tangled lines and marks beneath the layers of paint. Recently, the artist has been interested in giving his canvases weight with white and distorting the space with darkness close to black. The exhibition's title came to him while reading Gaston Bachelard's "Earth and Reveries of Repose." He was struck by a passage imagining darkness within the opaque whiteness of milk. There is a depth in his forests that one misses if one sees white as nothing but light.

Artist Park Kwangsoo presents “The Darkness of White Milk,” a solo exhibition at Hakgojae that transforms childhood memories and imagined scenes from Cheorwon into paintings. Hakgojae

The artist said that his paintings also contain "the sky my mother may have seen for the last time." Looking back at "All Skies" with this sentence in mind, there is a landscape unseen from the perspective that looks down on the person lying there: the sky between the branches that person would look up at.

The artist wrote, "Even if a house and a hometown remain in the same place, the time that made them a house and a hometown is gone." The exhibition runs through December 5.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.