Echoes in the Small Mountain: Park Dae-sung and the West Coast

A never-before-seen painting inspired by the vistas of Yosemite makes its debut in this selection of works by Park Dae-sung (b. 1945), a renowned contemporary artist credited with reinventing the techniques of traditional Korean ink painting. Alongside new compositions based on California landscapes, the exhibition features three epically scaled paintings gifted to the museum collection two decades ago, shown together here for the first time.

Instead of a photographic likeness, Park’s work conveys the powerful feeling of experiencing a monumental landscape, using energetic brushwork and inventive visual strategies to express the emotions stirred by nature’s grandeur. A painting of Korea’s Diamond Mountains compresses the mountain range into a single awe-inspiring rocky mass, creating what exhibition curator Yoon-Jee Choi calls “a panoramic mind-picture.”

Park (pen name Sosan 소산, “Small Mountain”) has traveled throughout his homeland since the 1970s to paint or sketch famed places in person; this exhibition’s Yosemite (2025) has the distinction of being his first painting depicting a landform outside of Korea.