A Blank Page
빈 종이 — TIKITAKA 민화 작가와의 대화
There is a particular quiet that settles over a room full of finished paintings — the quiet of pigment that has already dried, of decisions already made. [Artist Name]'s studio in Melbourne has that quiet, but only just. A white moon jar holds the light from a window of grey rooftops. Beside it, a cat reaches toward a crystal chandelier in oil and varnish. Further along the wall: peonies in full, riotous bloom; a scholar's desk stacked with books and brushes; a sun and moon suspended over five jagged peaks, rendered first on hanji, then again on canvas, the same composition revisited until it became something closer to a discipline than a subject.
This is Minhwa — Korean folk painting, practised for centuries by anonymous court and village artists, its grammar built from auspicious symbols, flattened perspective, and colour used without apology. [Artist Name] has carried that grammar across the world, and built a practice and a studio around teaching it to people who, in most cases, have never picked up a brush of mineral pigment in their lives.
We sat down with her at the long black table in the centre of her studio to talk about where the work begins, what it resists, and what — if anything — could stand in for a self-portrait.
Origins동양화가 뿌리다
왜 민화? 어떻게 시작했나. 색과 디테일을 사랑한다. 동양화가 뿌리다.
"Why Minhwa, and how did I start? I fell in love with its colour and detail. Its roots lie in Dongyanghwa — traditional East Asian painting."
It is a deceptively economical answer for a practice this exacting: layered mineral pigment, line drawn and redrawn until it holds, a visual language inherited rather than invented. But the attraction, by her own account, was never theoretical. Colour first. Precision of line second. The history, the iconography, the technical discipline — all of it followed, rather than led.
On Melbourne가장 개인적인 것이 가장 좋은 이야기
아트와 사람. 전통과 미래, 가장 개인적인 것이 가장 좋은 이야기가 될 수 있는 곳.
"Art, and people. A place where tradition and the future meet — and where the most personal story can become the best story."
She did not have to bring this practice here. Of all the places a centuries-old Korean tradition might continue, she chose a city built on the coexistence of the contemporary and the inherited. In her account, Melbourne is not a backdrop for the work but a condition of it — a place where a story this specific, this rooted in one country's visual history, does not need to be generalised to be understood. If anything, the specificity is what travels.
A Technique Without a Ceiling무제한이다
민화는 전통으로만 속박하기 어렵다. 무제한이다. 기법이지만 그것이 현대적인 표현을 만나는 게 즐겁다. 제한이 없는 그림. 아름다운 색. 스토리가 있는 것이 곧 역사이다. 현재를 그리는 동시에 그것이 역사가 되는 것.
"Minhwa can't be confined by tradition alone — it's limitless. It's a technique, but what I love is watching that technique meet contemporary expression. A painting without boundaries. Beautiful colour. Anything with a story is, in itself, history. To paint the present is, at the same time, to make history."
This is the governing logic of her practice: Minhwa is not an archive to be reproduced, but a method — vocabulary, pigment, line — supple enough to be turned on anything she chooses. A peony arrangement rendered with the formality of a court painting. A scholar's-desk still life, 책거리 (chaekgeori), restaged with native Australian wattle in place of imported porcelain. And, in one work made specifically for this city, Flinders Street Station — its dome and clock tower framed by pine trees and a Minhwa sun and moon, as if Melbourne's own civic landmark had always belonged inside this visual tradition.
Chaekgeori — a scholar's-desk still life of books, brushes and a vase of wattle
A classical peony and blue-and-white vase composition
Flinders Street Station reimagined in traditional Minhwa style on hanji paper
Teaching Without a Native Grammar자유분방함이 사랑스럽다
외국인들에게 가르치는 게 부담이 되지 않았나. 오히려 그들의 자유분방함이 사랑스럽다. 사실 디테일한 테크닉이 걱정이 많이 되었는데, 창의적이고 오히려 배우는 계기가 된다.
"Wasn't it a burden to teach this to people from other countries? Actually, I love their freedom and spontaneity. I worried a lot about the fine, detailed technique — but they're so creative, and it ends up becoming something I learn from too."
She expected the technical precision of Minhwa — its insistence on exact line, exact layering — to be a barrier for students arriving with no prior relationship to the form. Instead, the absence of inherited rules proved generative rather than limiting. Where trained instinct might hesitate, an unschooled hand simply proceeds. She describes the exchange as reciprocal: she teaches the technique, and her students, in their disregard for its conventions, hand something back.
The Moon Jar빛을 담는 여정
왜 달항아리인가. 동양의 부를 상징한다. (웃음) 그런 이유만은 아니지만 명상 중에 내가 무언가를 담는 사람이라는 느낌이 들었다. 그렇다면 여백과 비움이 미덕이라고 생각하는 동양의 달항아리가 떠올랐다. 너무 똑같지만 그릴 때마다 달라지는 빛을 담는 여정이다. 너무 아름답다. 빛과 색. 다채로움과 단조로움.
"Why the moon jar? In the East, it symbolises wealth. (laughs) That's not the only reason, though. During meditation, I felt that I was someone who holds, who contains things. And then the moon jar came to mind — in Eastern thought, emptiness and blank space are considered a virtue. It looks almost identical every time, yet the light inside it is always different — painting it is a journey of capturing that light. It's so beautiful. Light and colour. Richness and simplicity, together."
The 달항아리 — the Korean moon jar, prized historically for its near-symmetry achieved by joining two thrown hemispheres of porcelain — recurs through her work, and sits, in white, in her own studio as a kind of working reference. She speaks of it less as an object she paints and more as a discipline she returns to: the same form, attempted again and again, never quite resolving the same way twice, because the light inside it never does.
Toward an Audience즐겁게 즐기게 만드는 것
목표는? 민화를 즐겁게 즐기게 만드는 게 소망이다.
"My wish is simple — to make people enjoy Minhwa, joyfully."
Not preservation for its own sake. Not a formal correctness to be policed. Simply an opening — for the people who arrive at her studio with no relationship to this tradition, and leave having made something inside it that is unmistakably their own.
On Authenticity지금이 가장 나답다
나다움이란? 지금이 가장 나답다. 나를 찾아가는 여정은 소중하고 그 동행 속에 민화가 있다.
"Right now is when I'm most myself. The journey of finding myself is precious — and Minhwa walks that journey alongside me."
Not a fixed self she arrived at and settled into, but a position relative to an ongoing search — one she describes Minhwa as accompanying, rather than resolving.
A cat reaching toward a crystal chandelier beside a Korean moon jar
A Self-Portrait, Refused한지만 붙여두겠다
Asked, finally, to choose a single image — hers or anyone's — that might stand in for who she is, she paused for a long moment before answering.
그림 하나를 고른다면? 그럴 수 없다. 그냥 한지만 붙여두겠다. 무언가를 채워야만 하는 건 아니다. 무엇이든 할 수 있다는 그 믿음이 나다.
"I can't choose just one. I'd simply leave a blank sheet of hanji. You don't have to fill it with something. The belief that I can do anything — that's who I am."
The answer only fully lands in light of everything said before it — about emptiness as a virtue rather than an absence, about a single form yielding different light on every attempt, about painting the present and watching it harden, almost immediately, into history. Not nothing, and not an evasion. A surface still entirely open, held by the conviction that anything could yet be made on it.
TIKITAKA hosts hands-on Minhwa and Korean craft workshops in Melbourne.
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