At Harvard, it’s easy to lose track of the rest of the world. When your entire existence here is regimented into eight semesters, 128 credits, and a minimum GPA of 3.0, you sometimes forget that this isn’t the only – or even the best – way to do things. And it wasn’t until last week, when I heard the Korean artist Park Dae Sung speak on campus, that I personally got a wake-up call.
Since September 19, the Korea Institute at Harvard University has been displaying the ‘Park Dae Sung: Ink and Soul’ exhibition on the Councourse floor of the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS) South Building. Thirteen new ink paintings by contemporary artist Park Dae Sung, all produced exclusively for Harvard, are on show. The exhibition was curated by Sunglim Kim, the Associate Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College, and was organized by Sun Joo Kim, the Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History at Harvard. The art will be on display until December 8.
The paintings are a breathtaking sight. Featuring a range of traditional Korean landscapes, such as mountains and waterfalls, the artworks appear to be – at first glance – from a bygone era. But look just a little longer, and you’re hit with a startling feeling of modernity. The artworks are brimming with some kind of unrestrained, untouched vitality; they’re utterly unique in terms of composition, scale, and style, and they’re simultaneously restful yet energetic.
It all made sense when I heard Park himself speak at the Korea Institute-hosted Artist Talk and Symposium on Friday, October 28. Almost immediately in his keynote address, Park began to describe the tragedy that had marked the early years of his life. Born in southeastern Korea, he lost both parents as a child, and also his left arm. For the young Park, this was a difficult time. He was bullied by classmates, and also by other neighborhood kids on his long, arduous walks to and from school. He would sometimes skip school as a result, and go out to explore the mountains, rivers, and other natural features of the countryside instead. This was how he came to painting – he sought it out as an escape from the bullying, and found life in it through the beauty of the natural environment around him. After junior high, Park dropped out of school.
His self-educated status now seems to be one of his defining characteristics as an artist and person. It was certainly headlined by others at the symposium, and it was also something Park himself brought up several times. The moment with most clarity for me, however, came towards the end of the session.
In answer to an audience question, Park was recalling something he’d said in a conversation at one of his exhibitions in New York. An elderly white man had come up to Park, and asked how he felt as an outsider, someone without educational qualifications. Park replied that he felt himwelf to be “sansam” (wild ginseng from the mountains), while his peers with degrees were “insam” (farm-grown ginseng). The man seemed confused. Insam, Park said, does not last more than eight years; it starts to rot. Sansam does not. Over the years, Park had seen many of his more “educated” peers drop off, and nowadays, he alone had remained standing in the artistic world.
Park ended the New York story with a smile, recalling that the man, finally seeming to understand, had clapped.
Hearing Park’s anecdotes last Friday, it wasn’t hard to see the wild ginseng within the artist. Multiple times, he reiterated that he had learned to create his own schooling, and that this had opened him up to reach deeper, to continue practising, to experiment with and refine his techniques. He told us how, starting in his early twenties, he spent essentially two decades living in the mountains, making art. After going to see the famous landscapes of the Song dynasty in Taiwan, he had a transformative revelation about his own skills that caused him to stay for a year to paint in Taipei. And in one particularly memorable story, he travelled to New York’s Soho in the 1990s on the advice of his wife, who said it was the center of Western art. After a while, he had the insight – and the confidence – to discover that the place had nothing to teach him, and he left.
Looking back, it is this self-direction, this ability to devise his own direction and curricula, that I find particularly resonant about Park Dae Sung. As much as Harvard likes to talk about its cultivation of citizen-leaders, it can’t be denied that an institution is still, at its core, an institution. Harvard is a place with very definite rules, norms, and patterns of behavior – all necessary for an institution to run successfully, but also, perhaps, a little stifling.
So, while few of us will probably ever paint in below-freezing conditions on the peak of a mountain, there’s something vital for everyone within Park’s words.
As we grow and learn and strive for success at this school, it’s important to take a minute to think. To resist the urge to be trimmed into neat little rows of farm-grown ginseng. To instead find, and nurture, the core of wild ginseng within all of us.