Ink in the wood,
mountains at the blade's edge

Korean woodblock printmaking, in its modern form, inherited two quite different traditions. One was the black-line print of political urgency — reproducible, distributable, made to be held and read quickly. The other was the slow, layered, atmospheric tradition of East Asian ink-wash painting, where tone and gradation matter more than outline. Kim Jungwon's singular contribution has been to bring these two traditions together in a single practice.

The technique he developed — water-based multi-color woodblock printing — works not with the single impression of a block but with successive layerings: carving multiple blocks and printing them in sequence, each layer adding a register of tone. The ink is water-based and therefore responsive: it bleeds slightly, feathers at the edges, creates the atmospheric depth that characterises ink-wash without the spontaneity of the brush. Instead, the gradations are planned and carved — each tonal shift a decision made before the first impression is pulled.

The result is a form of printmaking that the critic Park Young-taek has described as occupying a singular position in Korean contemporary art — comparable in aesthetic lineage to the true-view landscape painting (진경산수) of Jeong Seon and Kim Hongdo in the late Joseon period, but achieved through a medium that carries the physical discipline of carving and the democratic potential of the printed multiple. Water and wood, in Kim's practice, are not opposites but partners.

The subject of Kim Jungwon's mature work is the Korean landscape — specifically the Baekdudaegan, the great mountain spine that runs from Baekdusan in the north to Jirisan in the south, forming the skeletal ridge of the Korean peninsula. His sustained fieldwork — walking, sketching, living inside the terrain — accumulates into prints that are not scenic depictions but topographic arguments: this land exists, in its full geological weight, across the artificial line of division.

The political charge of this subject is inseparable from Kim's biography. A former participant in the Minjung art movement, he came of age politically in a South Korea where the division of the peninsula was a structuring fact of everyday life. To paint the Baekdudaegan as one continuous ridge — to render Baekdusan in ink-wash, when Baekdusan is technically in the North — is an act of artistic reunification. The mountains do not recognise the border.

When his large-scale woodblock print Sanuun (山韻)-0901— completed in 2009 — hung at the Peace House in Panmunjom during the 2018 inter-Korean summit, this political reading became inescapable. The image of the two Koreas' leaders meeting against a backdrop of their shared mountain range, rendered in forty-eight layers of ink-wash woodblock, condensed decades of Kim's practice into a single globally televised moment. The mountain, in ink, said what the diplomats were still negotiating.

Kim Jungwon's path to printmaking began in the classroom. He taught art in secondary school after graduating from Hongik University, and through teaching became part of the art education movement — an effort, in the 1980s, to make art education in Korean schools less rote and more connected to the social reality of students' lives. That involvement led him to the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union (전교조), and in 1989, when joining the union became an act of political consequence, he was dismissed.

The dismissal removed one kind of public role and opened another. Through the Minjung art movement's organisational network — the 민미협 (Korean People's Artists Federation) and the 민예총 (Korean Federation of Arts and Culture) — Kim worked as a full-time artist and movement organiser. The printmaking skills he had been developing deepened as a practice of making images that could be circulated, like the ideas the movement was circulating.

The four years in China (1994–1997) were a second turning point: not a departure from commitment but a deepening of craft. On returning, he chose Jincheon, Chungcheong Province, rather than Seoul — a choice that embedded his practice in a particular landscape rather than an art-market geography. The Korean Woodblock Culture Research Institute he established there in 1997 has since become the Korea Woodblock Culture Center: a national institution for the preservation and transmission of woodblock as a living craft. Forty years after his first woodcut, Kim Jungwon is still at the block in Jincheon — carving the mountain, one layer at a time.