Provincial Art Museum Highlights Female Artist Heo San-ok from Jeollabuk-do
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Lee ByungJae(2025-11-12 13:36:51)
The Jeollabuk Provincial Museum (Director Lee Ae-seon) will host an exhibition series titled 'Heo San-ok, Under the Southern Window,' starting from the 15th, to shed light on the artistic world of Heo San-ok (許山玉, 1924~1993), a female artist from Jeollabuk Province.
As part of the 'Jeollabuk Art History Research Series,' this exhibition is the first research exhibition on a female artist in the series. Through this, the museum aims to lay the foundation for regional research on female art history and take the first step towards future research. Moreover, expanding the scope of the series, which has mainly focused on Western painters, this exhibition holds significance as it delves into traditional Korean painting genres such as saguja and hwa-jo-hwa for the first time.
Heo San-ok, originally known as Heo Gwi-nyeo, was more widely recognized by her pseudonyms Haengwon (杏園) or Namjeon (藍田). Born in Gimje, Jeollabuk Province, she studied at Namwon Gwonbeon and after liberation, she ran a studio called 'Haengwon' near Pungnammun in Jeonju, fostering exchanges and discourse among local artists.
She learned saguja and calligraphy from Yi Jae Heo Baek-ryeon and Kang-am Song Seong-yong, mastering the techniques of traditional literati painting. Heo San-ok, as a rare female painter in the region, continued her activities by being selected for numerous exhibitions at the National Art Exhibition of Korea, the Jeollabuk Province Art Exhibition, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Invitation Exhibition for Contemporary Art. Particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, in her mature years, she expressed the balance between life and art with vibrant colors and free brushstrokes in her colorful hwa-jo-hwa paintings, showcasing her unique aesthetic sensibility.
This exhibition is designed to revisit the multifaceted aspects of regional art history through the life and works of female painters who have relatively not received much attention in the local modern and contemporary art scene. Despite her active participation in the Jeollabuk art scene after liberation, Heo San-ok's life and works, which have not been adequately evaluated in art history, are traced to reinterpret the aesthetic world she constructed.
In the exhibition hall, alongside Heo San-ok's works, the exhibition restores the trajectory of female artists in regional art history through the works of local artists she interacted with and newly excavated archive materials. Furthermore, by exploring the surrounding temporal context, the identity of regional art, and the internal narrative of being a female artist, the exhibition aims to lay the foundation for regional art history and female art history.
During the same period, an event titled 'Jeollabuk Youth 2025: Invisible Land,' with the participation of Park Gyeong-deok and Lee Ool, will be held. Celebrating its 11th edition this year, 'Jeollabuk Youth' is a project that discovers and highlights young visual artists in the province through open calls and evaluations.
