Cave of Enlightenment

Park Dae-sung is one of South Korea’s most innovative ink painters. He combined a daring sense of space, diverse brush line effects and splashes of ink, and a dramatic use of color and composition to create this grand, austere, yet playful image of a perilous path to a cave. The secular world at the bottom of the painting is painted in pale ink tones and fine lines, the houses and trees spread out at wide angles as if viewed through a fish-eye lens. This creates a sharp contrast against the vertical layering of dark, rocky, mountains through which the long road winds upward toward the illuminated cave. The arduous road through the mountains culminating at the cave seems analogous to the Buddhist path to spiritual enlightenment.