The landscape of this land,
the faces of its people

Park Seongwan has painted the landscape of the region he inhabits for more than two decades. This is not a choice to stay provincial; it is a choice to look carefully. The streets of Gwangju, the villages of South Jeolla, the construction sites and galleries and squares where people gather — all of these become, under his brush, material as rich and demanding as any.

His series of construction-site paintings — shown across multiple exhibitions from 2012 through 2015 — took a subject that is usually invisible in fine art and made it central. The temporary, the unfinished, the zone between one state of a place and another: these were precisely what his bold, energetic brushwork was built to render. The paintings hold the site in its moment of transformation, before the scaffolding comes down and the ordinary resumes.

In later work — Landscape Beyond the Wind, Light and the Heart’s Hometown — the landscape becomes more lyrical, more interior. Place is still the subject, but what the painting reaches for is the emotion and memory that settle into a landscape over time: what it feels like to have grown up near these hills, to have passed through these streets, to carry a place inside you.

Park Seongwan's paintings are full of people. Or rather: they carry the presence of people even when figures are absent — in the lit window, the worn pavement, the half-finished wall. His practice has consistently returned to what he has described as “our stories”: the collective life that a particular community lives in a particular time.

This becomes explicit in exhibitions like People Met at Candlelight Square (2024), which centres on figures encountered in the spaces of civic gathering — the squares and streets where public life is made visible. The title refers to the candlelight protests that have been a recurring feature of Korean civic life; the paintings hold the faces and presences of people who showed up to make history in small, ordinary ways.

This attention to historical consciousness runs through his group show participations as well — from the 5·18 40th Anniversary May Art Festivalto exhibitions on climate justice, on the memory of specific political moments, on the shared life of communities across South Jeolla. In all of these, Park Seongwan's painting is less a record than an act of witness: a way of saying that this happened, these people were here, and painting can hold that.

To paint a place for more than two decades is to make an argument: that the particular matters, that what happens in Gwangju and South Jeolla is not a provincial footnote but a centre of its own. Park Seongwan's sustained practice in the region is itself a kind of claim — that painting rooted in place can carry as much weight, can say as much, as painting rooted anywhere else.

That claim extends to the social dimension of his work. His participation in group exhibitions on civic memory, climate justice, and historical commemoration — and his residencies at community-oriented spaces — reflect an understanding of painting as a public medium: not a luxury object made for collectors, but a way of attending to what a community experiences and needs to remember.

This is why Park Seongwan participates in this campaign as a fellow in solidarity with artists facing financial exclusion. His practice has always held that art is not separate from the conditions under which people live — and that those conditions, including financial ones, shape what can and cannot be made. The work sold here flows into the mutual-aid fund so that the next generation can keep painting.