Jiri and Dureun,
drawn in ink

Sumuk — painting in ink and water on paper — is among the oldest continuous traditions in East Asian art. Its difficulty is also its discipline: ink does not forgive. A stroke laid on hanji cannot be lifted, corrected, or painted over. What the brush does, the paper keeps.

U Yongmin's practice has been a long engagement with that discipline, and an effort to carry it into a contemporary sensibility. He does not treat sumuk as a museum language to be preserved unchanged; he treats it as a living medium, open to the scale, the subjects, and the feeling of the present. Birch forests, mountain ranges seen up close, the Four Gentlemen rendered with a modern hand — these are the materials through which he tests how far ink can travel.

The recurring title Tangjin Sumuk— roughly, “ink spent to exhaustion” — names the attitude. It is not ink used sparingly but ink given fully, an aesthetic of commitment rather than restraint.

〈Dureun〉 (2020), held by Haengchon Art Museum, measures 198×545cm in ink on hanji. The number is not a detail but a decision. At that width, the paper is no longer a surface the hand can reach across in a single gesture — it must be navigated, the brush carried over an expanse that exceeds the body.

Scale in ink painting is unlike scale in oil. A large oil canvas can be built up over weeks, layer over layer. A large sumuk work compresses time: the ground tone, the mountain ridge, the weight of a shadow — much of it has to be committed while the ink is still wet, in passages that cannot be undone. To make a five-metre painting in ink is to accept that the whole thing rests on gestures that allow no second chance.

This is why the recurring subject — Dureunsan, Jirisan, the southern ranges seen near and whole — matters. A mountain is large; a painting that wants to carry its weight must be large too. The scale is not display but fidelity: an attempt to give the mountain a surface equal to it.

The work is rooted in a place. Haenam, at the southwestern edge of the peninsula, with Dureunsan and Daeheungsa nearby; the broad reach of Jirisan; the islands and shores of Sinan and the Namdo coast. Many of the exhibitions name these coordinates directly — Hwaeom Jiri, The Moon and Stars of the Kim Whanki House, the Pungnyu Namdo Art Project.

To paint the same region across years is not repetition but deepening. The landscape becomes less a subject to be captured than a place to be known — in different seasons, at different scales, under different states of ink. The Jeonnam International Sumuk Biennale, in which he has taken part across several editions, is itself an expression of this regional commitment: an argument that the Namdo tradition of ink painting is a living, contemporary practice, not a heritage display.

His art books gather these coordinates into form — 《Dureun》 (2020) and 《Jiri》 (2025), two volumes that take the names of the mountains and make them the names of a body of work.