Mountains and money trees

There is a new superstition among wealthy Korean families. Hang one of Kim Chong Hak’s paintings in your apartment to cloak the home in luck. The flower-heavy landscapes bring special fortune to sons and daughters taking university entrance exams, or so the story says.

So Seoul’s ladies who lunch have taken to visiting the artist’s current retrospective show, says the museum’s staff. Now in his eighties, Hak is double the age of the mid-life crisis that started all the fame. Like his peers at the time, Hak began his career in abstracts. Dark early works show brushstroke skeletons in black and white.

One day Hak decided to turn his back on the west’s Jackson Pollock craze. The movement’s concepts, he felt, never translated to the Korean art scene, only amounted to copies of surface aesthetics and wasted time.

Instead he started to paint flowers. He left his art world, wife and family behind, and moved to the mountains. At Serok Moutain he took long walks with butterflies, scribbled in bright, new crayon colours.

He painted the greens of summer, browns of fall, pinks of spring, and whites of winter. His paintings turned from dark and serious to colorful and youth. Vibrant manic brush stores and layers of rainbow lines collage the faces of flowers in his work.

The positivism resonated with the Korean mass. At age sixty, the work started to sell. Underneath his mountain Hak found both peace and his money tree. And with the young sons and daughters of his country, Hak managed to share his luck.