In Park Chan-kyong’s painting “Eyeball Zen Master” (2025), a disciple whose eyeball has been torn out is smiling. Blood pours from the wound — an emergency by any measure — yet a strange grin spreads across his face.
The work is a reworking of a Buddhist story about Guji Zen Master. The tale says Guji taught by raising a single finger when asked about the Dharma. A novice monk copied the gesture without understanding it, and Guji cut off the boy’s finger. The story does not end there: Guji later summoned the novice and asked, “What is the great meaning of the Buddha Dharma?” As the novice tried to raise his index finger, he saw it was gone and, the story says, reached enlightenment.
Park replaced the finger with an eyeball to make the theme his own. “As a painter, or a visual artist, if I’m dealing with the riddle-like stories of Zen koans, I thought the eye worked better than the finger,” he said.
A representative of the Jogye Order offered a blunt explanation: “The point is that everything is absent.” The representative continued: “It’s the realization of, ‘I said it was there when it wasn’t.’ It exists, yet it doesn’t; it doesn’t exist, yet it does. Knowing that you don’t know is the beginning. Then you can begin from there.”
Park discussed appropriation, transformation and artistic identity at a press preview March 19 for his solo exhibition “Eyeball Zen Master” at Kukje Gallery in Seoul.
“I can’t say my work lacks individuality, but my main interest is less in finding an original expression of Korean modernization than in recreating stories and pictorial motifs that have been handed down for a long time,” he said. “I like going to temples and taking photographs. From that process, I transform or borrow motifs I find in paintings.”
The exhibition includes works that reshape Buddhist episodes into what Park described as a kind of “Zen Buddhist grotesque SF.” They include “Huike Cutting Off His Arm” (2026), based on the story of Huike severing his arm in pursuit of the Way, and “Hyetong Zen Master” (2025), his take on the story of Hyetong showing resolve to learn the Dharma by carrying a brazier on his head.
The gallery space also echoes a temple. “When you go to a temple, you see a lot of dark browns and greens,” Park said. “I painted the exhibition space in those colors to create that atmosphere.”
In “The Late-Arriving Bodhisattva — Diorama” (2026), Park replaces the Buddha and the disciple Mahakashyapa with the Buddha and a rabbit. He referred to a commonly depicted scene in which the Buddha extends his feet in welcome when Mahakashyapa arrives late to the cremation. “But I think painting it exactly as it was long ago isn’t very realistic,” Park said. “This is a much more gloomy and troubled era, so I changed it to a lonelier scene, with a rabbit looking at the Buddha’s feet.”
Park said encountering “Eyeball Zen Master” can feel like looking at a pagoda. “My attitude toward tradition is similar to the feeling of looking at the pagoda in the painting ‘Brother-and-Sister Pagoda,’” he said. “When I saw that pagoda before, it felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time — like I almost understood it, but didn’t. I wanted to show that feeling. The figures in the painting looking at the pagoda and viewers looking at my paintings are the same.”
The exhibition runs through May 10 at Kukje Gallery K1.
* This article has been translated by AI.
Copyright ⓒ Aju Press All rights reserved.