Kwon InKyung South Korean, b. 1979
Kwon InKyung (b. 1979) is a South Korean contemporary painter whose practice explores landscapes, memory, and the temporality embedded in place.
Kwon completed her BFA (2002), MFA (2004), and PhD (2012) in Oriental Painting at Hongik University in Seoul, developing a profound understanding of traditional techniques and materials while expanding her artistic vocabulary. Rather than remaining within convention, she fuses traditional methods with modern media to construct a distinctive painterly language that reinterprets contemporary landscapes.
Her works combine ink, pigments, and acrylic with fragments of old book pages or paper collaged onto the canvas. This process serves as a device to visualise traces of time and memory layered within a landscape. The scenes she paints move beyond mere representation of nature, evoking residues of human experience and accumulated temporality.
Kwon’s artistic world reveals points at which inner landscapes meet the external world. She juxtaposes sites personally experienced with recollected scenes, presenting new spatio-temporal dimensions in which reality and ideality, past and present, become intertwined. This approach resonates with Michel Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia”, realised in her painting as spaces where reality intersects with imagined realms.
She has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Korea and abroad, and her works are held in public and institutional collections including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Art Bank, Yangpyeong County Museum, the Seoul Eastern District Prosecutors’ Office, and Jeongneung Station on the Ui–Sinseol Light Rail. Her paintings do not simply depict external views but conjure psychological landscapes layered with memory and sensation, inviting viewers to recall places of their own.
For the artist, landscape is not merely an image of the external world but a stratified field of lived experience and time. As such, her paintings are at once strange and familiar, concrete and abstract, bearing a dual character. Rooted in the tradition of Korean painting yet realised through contemporary materials and forms, Kwon’s work offers a vision of landscape that speaks directly to the sensibilities of the present.
