OKNP Busan presents Modern: Between Modernity and Tradition, a special exhibition that brings together major figures of Korean modern and contemporary art in a single survey. Through works by artists who reinterpreted tradition in distinctly modern terms, the exhibition examines how “the modern,” as a new artistic language, encountered the traditional sensibility of Korea and evolved into an independent aesthetic of its own.

The exhibition features approximately thirty works by some fifteen leading artists in Korean modern and contemporary art, including Kim Whanki, Yoo Youngkuk, Park Soo Keun, and Lee Jung Seob—artists whose works have rarely been shown in Busan—alongside Na Hye Sŏk, Lee In Sung, Do Sang Bong, Chang Ucchin, and Chun Kyungja. Although they belong to different generations and reflect diverse aesthetic tendencies, these artists share a common understanding of tradition not as something to be severed from the present, but as a vital source for new forms of expression.

Korean modern and contemporary art cannot be explained simply as a process of adopting Western modernism. Through the turbulence of the Japanese colonial period, liberation, war, and industrialization, artists sought to recover a lost cultural identity. In doing so, they incorporated traditional views of nature, emotional sensibilities, scenes of local life, and Eastern concepts of space and beauty into modern formal language in a wide variety of ways. Tradition did not remain a matter of repeating inherited forms; rather, it was reinterpreted in a contemporary manner through new structures, materials, and ways of seeing.

Kim Whanki and Yoo Youngkuk reduced natural landscapes into geometric structures and fields of color, extending an Eastern view of nature into the language of modern abstraction. Park Soo Keun and Lee Jung Seob distilled the lives of ordinary people and the emotional realities of their time into rough textures and expressive lines, creating profound images of the Korean human condition. Chang Ucchin and Lee Dae Won reconfigured folk-painting motifs and natural scenery through simplified compositions and a distinctly modern sense of color, while Chun Kyungja, grounded in the tradition of Korean color painting, explored the modern possibilities of traditional painting through vivid color and highly original compositions of figures and nature.

In this way, the works presented in the exhibition demonstrate that tradition and modernity are not opposing concepts. Tradition is revived through new forms, and modernity acquires a distinctly Korean sensibility upon the foundation of tradition. Modern: Between Modernity and Tradition sheds light on this important art-historical trajectory and offers a broader understanding of how Korean modern and contemporary art has taken shape.

At the same time, the exhibition offers audiences in Busan a rare opportunity to encounter works by major masters of Korean modern and contemporary art firsthand, while also providing an accessible framework for understanding the uniquely Korean aesthetic consciousness formed at the intersection of tradition and modernity.