Jung Tak-young and the Making of Abstract Ink Painting in Postwar Korea

Abstract

Long regarded as paradigmatic in histories of modern art in Asia, abstraction assumed new urgency in the hands of ink painters like Jung Tak-young (1937–2012). During the politically and socially turbulent early decades of postwar Korea, Jung played an exemplary role in the Korean emergence of a self-consciously abstract ink painting through sustained experimentation that included rejecting the use of ink, the very material that crucially defined ink painting. For Jung, abstraction was a necessary platform for rethinking entrenched concepts of medium, presence, and form in hopes of arriving at a more expanded view of contemporary art.