The Korean artist using traditional techniques to portray queer life

According to an old legend, Korea began when a divine king tasked a bear and a tiger with becoming human, which they would achieve by spending 100 days in a cave, eating only cloves of garlic and mugwort roots. The bear succeeded and was transformed into a woman; the tiger gave up halfway through and failed the assignment. “This left it as an unstable, incomplete being,” explains Grim Park, a Korean artist whose work combines the techniques of traditional Buddhist painting with contemporary queer themes. The tiger is a recurring motif in Park’s paintings, but unlike those which appear in Korean folklore (one assumes), his tigers enjoy rimming.

Out of a shortlist of ten, Park is one of three winners of Kiaf Highlights, an award handed out by South Korea’s oldest and largest international arts fairs. Set across three vast, hangar-like halls in the COEX Convention centre, Kiaf hosts over 175 galleries from around the world, each of which submitted an artist for the prize. An onsite panel decided that Park, along with painter Nohwan Park and Donghoon Rhee, a painter and sculptor, best embodied the year’s theme of “resonance”, the idea that – as Kiaf – “waves originating in the artist’s inner world ripple outward — to viewers, galleries, and the broader art ecosystem— generating new reverberations of meaning and emotion”.

During Kiaf’s three-day run last week, I sat down with Park at the THEO gallery booth to discuss his work, which certainly resonates with me. Not only is his project of reinterpreting a historic and religious aesthetic through a queer lens interesting, but the images themselves are arrestingly beautiful: his work is lush, enticing and rich with meaning. Dressed all in black, Park has a delicate, gentle demeanour and a sprightly good humour which shines through even as we speak through an interpreter.

The language barrier does provide some challenges, however. Park’s practice is so intricate that it takes a long back-and-forth, and being shown several images of works-in-progress, before I can arrive at even a basic understanding, although perhaps this would have been the case even had I spoken fluent Korean. Park studied as an apprentice in taenghwa – a traditional form of Korean painting – for three years, then completed a BFA in Buddhist art, achieving a technical mastery and highly specialised knowledge which he draws upon today. Based on Buddhist painting from the Goryeo era (a period of Korean history stretching from 918 to 1392), his process involves sketching out an initial outline, stretching silk over a wooden frame, layering paint over it and then applying hanji, a traditional Korean mulberry paper, to the other side.

The content of his paintings, as well as the form, is inspired by his deep understanding of Korean history, religion and folklore. Raised in a Buddhist household, he remains drawn towards what he sees as the religion’s ethos of compassion and inclusivity. “It doesn’t reject anyone, which is why I find it so attractive,” he says. The tiger appears most prominently in an ongoing series titled ShimHoDo, which reimagines a Buddhist fable about a monk achieving enlightenment through a ten-stage quest with a bull. In Park’s interpretation, the animal serves as both a symbol for duality and a representation of himself.

“My own identity also has two layers which co-exist,” he says. “If I don’t come out, then people will just see me as a straight man, but my sexual orientation is still inside of me. I do very traditional Korean art which at the same time has a contemporary element, so there are two very different aspects to my artistic practice. And while I’m based in Seoul now, I come from a different region. So in many ways, I’m like a tiger with two sides within myself.” Park’s tigers are mischievous and playful; sometimes violent (in “Zero two” (2024) one devours the body of a young man representing its past self), sometimes sad and sometimes horny: in “True love is rimming”, the tiger is drooling, its eyes gazed with lust as it parts a lover’s cheeks. Leaving little to interpretation, a 2020 series of works specifically name the tiger’s tail as a symbol for the penis. These paintings are a bold reinvention of what is still, in Korea, typically a conservative aesthetic.

In Korea, paintings like this are very popular and said to bring good luck... but I’m adding a queer element to it – this could be snow, but it could also mean semen – Grim Park

While the human figures in Park’s paintings typically wear garments of the kind you’d see in Buddhist art, his earlier work is more explicitly modern: a 2018 series presents handsome men wearing leather harnesses, tighty-whiteys, baseball caps, army uniforms, and nothing at all. There is a contrast between the banality of the source material (the Instagram selfie) and how exquisitely the subjects are rendered, as though they were warriors or saints. “I went through social media sites like Instagram and Facebook, and I chose gay men that I thought were popular and who were doing this very well,” he says. “At that point, I wasn’t comfortable presenting myself in this way, so by portraying these very confident gay men, I wanted to gain confidence and break out of my shell.” A 2024 series – XOXO – dispenses with symbolism altogether and portrays gay sex as explicitly as possible, yet these images too bear the grace and delicacy which mark his style.

In recent years, Park has experimented by eliminating figures from his paintings and focusing instead on flowers, objects, symbols and decorative patterns. These pieces aren’t abstract, exactly, but they are more ambiguous. “My past work was more detailed and detail-oriented, so I wanted to try creating work that’s more symbolic and sends my message in a simpler way,” he says. “Return” (2024) features a stark, minimalist version of a wheel, the Buddhist symbol for reincarnation; another painting on display at Kiaf depicts the first flowers of winter.

By focusing on symbols, Parks wanted to represent queer activities in a way that the gay community would pick up on immediately and straight audiences might not. “In Korea, paintings like this are very popular and said to bring good luck. So it’s starting from a common concept in Korea, but I’m adding a queer element to it – this could be snow, but it could also mean semen,” he says, just as a nearby painting – “the back door blooms” (2024) – suggests both a flower and anal sex.

In “Korean pick me up” (2024), he depicts an energy drink which is popular in Korea and particularly associated with stigmatised communities like sex workers, transgender people or anyone who might be considered “lower-class”. Subverting these assumptions, Parks presents it as a kind of holy water, perched on the edge of a zig-zagging cliff above a dark, almost cosmic ocean. This is a thread which runs throughout Park’s work: by portraying outsiders as figures of religious or mythic significance, he grants them a dignity they are denied in the dominant culture.

Since he began his career in 2016, Park has seen an explosion of queer art in South Korea. “When I started out, there were maybe one or two queer artists working here,  but more and more have been emerging,” he says, citing Nahwan Jeon, Haneyl Choi and Dan Kim as some of those he admires the most. South Korea is still a relatively conservative society when it comes to attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community (although this is changing for the better), and Park himself experienced many moments of rejection while growing up. He concludes, “Through my work, I hope that being queer can coexist in the society of patriarchy and discrimination.”

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