Painting what is not seen
expands the medium itself

Korean ink painting carries a weight of history that can settle over a younger artist like a fixed inheritance. Riho took the opposite route: rather than receiving the medium as a closed canon, she studied it long enough to ask what it might still become.

That study was deliberate. A graduate of the Department of Oriental Painting at Sungshin Women's University, she went on to a master's degree at the Hongik University Graduate School and is now in its doctoral program — a sustained, formal engagement with the very medium she experiments on. The result is not a break with dongyanghwa but an extension of it from within: the materials remain ink, paper, pigment; the question of what they can do is held open.

This is what it means to expand the medial possibilities of a tradition through the eyes of a younger generation. The history is not discarded. It is carried forward, and pressed against its own edges.

Her 2022 solo exhibition at Sai Art Document, Seoul, names the practice: 〈The Invisible Project〉. The title is a proposition as much as a subject. To paint the invisible is not to paint nothing; it is to attend to the part of a scene, a relationship, or a memory that escapes direct vision — the residue that a frame cannot contain.

Ink painting is unusually suited to this. Its washes, its reserved whites, its capacity to suggest rather than describe make it a medium already practiced in the not-quite-seen. Riho leans into that capacity, using the traditional language of dongyanghwa to register conditions rather than objects — what is felt at the edge of perception rather than fixed at its centre.

The tone is contemplative and the method experimental, and the two are not in tension. The work asks the viewer to slow down, to look for what is not immediately given, and in doing so to notice how much of any image lives outside its visible boundary.

For a painter of her generation, Riho's work has travelled remarkably far. In 2022 it hung at FOCUS ART FAIR PARIS in the Carrousel du Louvre; in 2023 it appeared at BAMA, the Busan International Art Fair, at BEXCO; in 2024 at the Insa-dong YOUNG & FUTURE Art Fair. A traditional Korean medium, carried by a younger hand, moving across very different rooms.

The same restless inquiry shows up across her group exhibitions, under titles that read almost like a single ongoing thought: 〈Relationship Turning Point〉, 〈Landscape Liberation〉, “Within contemplation, each has its own sound,” 〈NO MATTER〉, 〈All Returns to the Source〉. Each frames a slightly different angle on perception, relation, and change — the recurring concerns of a practice built on the invisible.

Movement, here, is not only geographical. It is the movement of an old medium being asked new questions. Riho lends that momentum to this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists — so that the ground a younger painter works on might be a little wider for those who come after.