Coming home from market

A mother in traditional Korean clothing (hanbok), a basket on her head, and a boy return home from the market, a dog following behind.

Park Sookeun paintings are unique. Modest in scale, somber, and roughly textured, they are at first glance unassuming and unpretentious. But it is these very qualities, combined with the abstract, simplified rendering of his idyllic subject matter--country scenes of everyday life--that give his works their power and poetry.