Park Dae-sung: California and Korean Ink in Dialogue
For the first time in his career, renowned contemporary artist Park Dae-sung painted a mountain that is not Korean.
That mountain is California’s Yosemite.
On view at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Yosemite (2025) marks a threshold for one of Korea’s most celebrated painters. As the museum notes, the work “has the distinction of being his first painting depicting a landform outside of Korea.”
Park Dae-sung (b. 1945), known by his pen name Sosan (소산), meaning “Small Mountain,” is widely recognized for reinventing traditional Korean ink painting. After losing his arm during the Korean War, he taught himself to paint, transforming personal resilience into a lifelong artistic pursuit. Over decades, he traveled extensively across Korea to study and paint its mountains firsthand, developing monumental compositions that merge time-honored ink traditions with a strikingly contemporary sense of scale.
In January 2026, Park gave a talk with curator Yoon-jee Choi to discuss the new exhibition What Echoes in the Small Mountain: Park Dae-sung and the West Coast.
The “Small Mountain”
During the lecture, Park recalled the origin of his name: “my grandfather gave me a name called Small Mountain, Sosan, and initially I did not like it.” His grandfather explained to him that “a small mountain doesn’t dominate the landscape, it listens to it.”
Listening, rather than conquering, defines his posture.
The exhibition title, What Echoes in the Small Mountain, suggests that geography is secondary to interiority. Listening itself allows to hear an echo, implying a response from something already within.
Park’s early life shaped that inward discipline. In the lecture, he stated, “When I was young, I could not receive formal training because I lost my left arm… without prosthetics I was isolated in social circumstances.” He added, “That’s when I focused on paintings and then that’s how I trained myself to become an artist.”
Isolation became practice. Practice became structure, grounded in humility.
“Having lived a long life, if there’s one thing that I would like to say is I have reservations around elitism, around education, where people praise about degrees and what college they’re from, what PhD they have.” Instead, “I believe art in all fields of study is an endless learning process.”
Ink and Irreversibility
Park describes ink painting as cultivation, but the discipline begins before the first stroke.
In a documentary released by Korean International Broadcaster Arirang TV, he speaks of preparing the ink and clearing his mind before touching the brush to paper. The ritual is deliberate ; not ornamental, but necessary.
“Eastern painting is the art of the spirit. The body alone does not make us human. Spirit does. So I must cultivate myself at all times for truth flows from the very tip of the brush.”
The stroke, once made, cannot be revised.
During the lecture, Park stated: “In calligraphy we use ink brush, and with ink brush you have to practice with a very precise and restrained manner because there’s no such thing as an eraser in calligraphy.”
Irreversibility is not metaphor. It is method. Each mark carries consequence.
Park describes the sensation he seeks in landscape not as replication, but as depth. In the documentary, he compares the feeling as what is felt during a sunset or sunrise, when the sun meets the horizon. “In those moments, we sense the immense depth and meaning the earth contains. That is the feeling embedded in ink.”
For decades, that feeling was drawn from Korean mountains, terrain he had walked, observed, and internalized. With Yosemite, the source shifts, the echo from within stays.
Mountains in Dialogue
The exhibition presented by the Asian Art Museum is one of a kind. It explores Park’s evolving relationship with the American West Coast, a region that has shaped his recent work and expanded his dialogue beyond Korea. The Asian Art Museum, among the first Western institutions to collect his paintings, presents its three early acquisitions together for the first time, alongside new works inspired by California’s landscapes.
In the gallery, Yosemite faces Korean mountains across the room. The arrangement creates a visual dialogue: granite cliffs confronting peaks long internalized through decades of study.
The exhibition pairs Yosemite with Park’s depiction of North Korea’s Diamond Mountain and includes a historical Yosemite painting by Japanese American artist Chiura Obata (1885–1975). Ink here moves across borders and generations, revealing continuity within change.
The exhibition extends beyond mountains. A moon jar painting introduces asymmetry and quiet balance. Nearby, willow trees arc across paper. Of the willow, Park says: “It’s a tree that breathes a profound humanity into our hearts.”
The willow bends; the mountain stands. Both are held within the same disciplined hand.
Displayed alongside the paintings are Park’s brushes and tools ; reminders that philosophy here is enacted physically. Each stroke remains final.
Yosemite and the Bay Area
Yosemite occupies a singular place in California’s imagination. It symbolizes wilderness, scale, and myth.
Yet Park does not monumentalize Yosemite through spectacle. He absorbs it.
During the lecture, he emphasized identity over geography: “The most important thing I realized is that it’s important to have your identity and values that you consider important in life… So knowing yourself and sticking by your words is important.”
From a Bay Area perspective, a region often defined by reinvention and acceleration, Park’s approach offers quiet contrast. His practice is grounded and irreversible, in a region’s culture built on pace and revision.
Park does not adapt his discipline to meet a new landscape. He allows the landscape to enter a discipline already formed.
A California mountain enters Korean ink. Not overwritten, but absorbed.
The museum’s framing of Yosemite as Park Dae-sung’s first painting of a landform outside Korea underscores the milestone. But the exhibition does not signal rupture. Korean mountains remain present, facing Yosemite across the gallery.
Echo is not imitation. It is return, altered yet intact.
In the lecture, reflecting on ego, Park stated: “Letting go of ego allows the work to continue its journey.”
That journey now includes Yosemite.
What Echoes in the Small Mountain: Park Dae-sung and the West Coast remains on view at the Asian Art Museum through July 13. Visitors can stand between Korean peaks and Yosemite, observe the moon jar and willow, and examine the brushes that shape each final stroke.
In this crossing of terrain, discipline travels, echoes return, and identity lives.
Featured image: Courtesy of Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
