Leaves moved by the wind, feathers of flakes swirling, snow has settled on a canvas like white fluff on branches. The artist Kui soon Park, who is currently showing her new pictures in the Galerie Mutare mixes influences from historical South Korean landscape painting with European painting traditions to arrive at her conception of landscape.
However, it is not the exact representation of nature, let alone its idealization, that is important to her, but rather the mental snapshot of impressions during her hikes through flora and fauna. The forest appears to her as a place of mysterious beauty that inspires awe.
Crystals and needles
A series of landscape formats traces ice crystals on pine needles in close-up in iridescent blue tones and is reminiscent of the water lily paintings from Claude Monet’s later creative phase. In one painting, a sprawling carpet of flowers in pink and green spreads out.
© Galerie Albrecht
Layers of color overlap, from which Kui soon Park draws shadowy contours and shapes, and, like the French impressionists, takes into account the influence of air, light and shadow in order to arrive at images that reject anything noisy.
She shows traces of wind and weather on the plants: withered grass, withered autumn leaves, wild ferns, blossoms sprouting in spring or trees fallen by storms. Trunks covered in snow become visible, emerging from the natural world, which for Kui soon Park also symbolizes the eternal growth and decay of all vegetative life. In some works, a deer can be seen looking shyly out of the undergrowth.
A different attitude
People are missing and seem to have no place in the painter’s pictures. Her works look like film stills; she sometimes uses the camera to capture her observations for the first time. She finds her motifs for the pictures created in 2025 and 2026 (prices: 350-4600 euros) in the Berlin forests, the area around Köpenick, where she has her studio, and in the landscape park at the former Johannisthal airport.
Kui soon Park, born in 1983, came to Berlin from South Korea in 2005, where she studied at the Weißensee School of Art and became a master student of Hanns Schimansky. Since 2013, her paintings and works on paper have been on display at exhibitions in Seoul and Berlin. About her works she says: “It’s about changing our attitude: instead of just using nature, we should understand it as something that we have to live with and respect, and perceive its existence in a new way.”