〈Maewolgwaneum — The Moon, Plum Blossoms and Guanyin〉 Catalog — Jeong Hyeong-tak review (2026)

Maewolgwaneum (梅月觀音) — Shin Jang-sik Solo Exhibition

In April 2018, for the first time since the division of the peninsula, an inter-Korean summit was held on the second floor of the Peace House on the southern side of Panmunjom. After the talks, the two leaders embraced against a painting of Mt. Geumgang. Built up by adhering hanji to canvas and laying acrylic brushstrokes over the raised relief, 〈Mt. Geumgang from Sangpaldam〉 (2001) thus became a silent witness to peace.

Shin Jang-sik has been painting Mt. Geumgang since 1993. The early works, however, were built from photographs and reportage. With its emphatic mountain forms and the empty space (yeobaek) of East Asian painting, that Mt. Geumgang was a conceptual landscape — what the artist himself called "an expression of sa-eui (寫意, idealized intent) formed in the process of studying source material." When tours to the mountain opened in 1998, the artist visited Mt. Geumgang in person more than ten times. From that moment, the true-view (jingyeong) of the mountain's twelve thousand peaks — Manmulsang, Guryong Falls, Okryudong, Haegeumgang, Birobong — began to unfold. The conceptual Mt. Geumgang he had imagined only through photographs was transformed into a true-view Mt. Geumgang of vitality and the mountain's qi, of brisk brushwork and exuberant color.

The formal signature of the 〈Mt. Geumgang series〉 includes a technique in which hanji is dissolved in water and accreted onto the canvas before color is laid down; beyond that, "lightly tangled, web-like lines" come to rest on the surface as if by nature. These lines may be read as the modernist trace of an artist's own hand declaring "this is painting"; they may also be read as the traditional obangsaek (five-color palette) the artist has long explored, or as the qi of the mountain itself.

The COVID-19 pandemic, by closing off Mt. Geumgang, drove him to paint Mt. Seorak as its counterpart (對句). Cheonbuldong Valley and the Cheonhwadae ridge, Gongnyongneungseon and Yongajangseong now extend the spine of the Baekdudaegan range.

This exhibition presents 〈Moon and Plum Blossoms, Lingering〉 for the first time. Plum blossoms have not been part of the artist's subject matter until now. Set against his long preoccupation as an artist with tradition, cosmos, and Buddhism — through Korean traditional patterns, banners, cheongsachorong lanterns, Arirang — plum blossoms are an unfamiliar subject. The works were also made specifically for Hanju Art Space.

If Eo Mongryong's 〈Plum and Moon〉 (depicted on the Korean 50,000-won banknote) fills space with an upright branch and a moon behind it, Shin Jang-sik's red and white plum blossoms fill the entire surface, and a full moon fills the picture behind them. Plum blossoms the artist sketched in Gurye have met an imagined moon. The blossoms here have been absorbed into the artist's painterly form rather than into their conventional symbolic or traditional meaning. They are drawn as rounded, billowing outlines; branch and flower joined into a single contour, these circular plum blossoms can be read as primal images of life and cosmos. The great deep ranges of Mt. Geumgang and Mt. Seorak are good; so too are the plum blossoms blooming early in the southern provinces. A mountain without plum blossoms is not beautiful; plum blossoms without a mountain are lonely. The Baekdudaegan — the very spine of a peninsula symbolized by division and reunification — seems to bloom here as the "Arirang of hope."

— Jeong Hyeong-tak (Director, Hanju Art Space)