Every morning,
the truth in a single frame

When the Hankyoreh launched in May 1988, South Korea was in the first year of direct presidential elections after decades of authoritarian rule. The new newspaper — founded by journalists who had refused to follow dictates during the Chun Doo-hwan era — needed a visual voice as bold as its editorial mission. Park Jae-dong was that voice.

For eight years, from the paper's founding until 1996, Park drew the Geurimpan column daily. The column's targets were the figures of power: successive presidents, prosecutors and intelligence services, the conglomerates, and the National Assembly. What distinguished the Geurimpan from its predecessors was directness. Earlier Korean editorial cartoons tended toward allegory and implication; Park's work made the subject recognisable, the critique explicit. His caricatures — exaggerated, physically unkind to the powerful, sometimes blunt to the point of provocation — were a daily assertion that the press existed to hold power to account.

The phrase most often quoted to summarise the period — “Korean editorial cartooning divides into before Park Jae-dong and after Park Jae-dong” — is shorthand for a genuine shift. The Geurimpan column set the terms for what political satire could look like in Korean newspapers during the pivotal years of democratic consolidation. Its influence extended beyond journalism: cartoonist Kang Full has stated publicly that Park's work was what first drew him toward comics as a medium.

Park Jae-dong's practice belongs to the tradition of editorial cartooning as civic institution — the idea that a cartoonist working for a daily newspaper occupies a public role distinct from that of a fine artist or a journalist writing prose. The cartoon, in this tradition, is a verdict delivered in a single image: a judgment that does not require the reader to follow an argument to its conclusion, because the conclusion arrives first, in the picture.

Park developed this tradition in the specific conditions of South Korean democratisation. His years at the Hankyoreh coincided with the consolidation of direct elections, the lifting of press restrictions, and the emergence of civil society after decades of authoritarian governance. In that context, the decision to draw what others did not — to name what others implied — was itself a political act, not merely a formal one.

Beyond the Geurimpan, Park's engagement with cartooning as social speech continued: he contributed to human-rights cartoon collaborations, and in animation brought a satirical sensibility into a new medium. As a professor at KARTS, he carried the argument — that images can and should hold power to account — into the next generation of Korean artists. His work and his pedagogy are continuous: both insist that the cartoon is not a minor form but a civic one.

When Park Jae-dong left the Hankyoreh in 1996 to found the animation company Odolttogi, he was not departing from cartooning — he was taking it somewhere new. Animation, in his understanding, extended what the static editorial cartoon could do: it added time, movement, and sound to the single-frame verdict. His animated editorial segments for weekend news programmes brought political satire into a broadcast context where it had rarely appeared.

In 2001, his invitation to join KARTS as a professor in the Animation department formalised a pedagogical role he had been assuming informally for years. At KARTS, one of Korea's most selective arts institutions, Park brought together his experience as an editorial cartoonist, animator, and travel sketcher into a teaching practice that argued for the social seriousness of drawn images. For students entering a media landscape transformed by digital platforms, his insistence on the cartoon's civic function was both historical and prospective.

His travel sketch books — in particular the Silk Road Sketch Journey series — show another dimension of his practice: direct observation, the notebook as primary document, the hand as instrument of record. Whether drawing a political leader in caricature or a landscape encountered in travel, the method is consistent: look directly, mark what you see, make the image do the work.