In Korean art, white carries weight. At the Seattle Art Fair, and again at Margolis Gallery B612’s live performance, white was the fullest thing in the room. It held ink, history, grief, courtship, and the long patience of a tradition that composes empty space as carefully as any brushstroke.
The evening was part of a cultural program supported by the Korean Consulate in Seattle, pairing the gallery’s Art Fair presentation with a live performance, Korean Rhapsody, which combined salpuri (살풀이), buchaechum (부채춤) fan dance, talchum masks, and seoye (서예) calligraphy. This is the second year of the collaboration between the gallery and its artists, and the room felt closer to a festival than an opening.
The performance: A sijo love story without words
Two performers, both dressed in white, entered a gallery hung with contemporary paintings and lined with a pleated white paper wall. Set into its folds were traditional Korean masks: the pale bride’s mask with its three red dots of rouge, and the dark, laughing wooden masks of the Hahoe tradition. Before dancing, the performer gave the audience a short history lesson, because the dance is built on a poem.
Sijo, Korea’s classical three-line verse form, emerged in the late fourteenth century as the Goryeo dynasty gave way to Joseon. In that turbulent transition, scholars used the form to speak of loyalty and principle, of how to stay true while the state changed hands. As the Joseon era matured, sijo opened up. Ordinary feelings flooded in: nature, longing, and above all, love.
The performance drew on one of the most celebrated of these romances, the story of a gisaeng and a scholar-official who exchanged sijo as love letters. Fate kept them apart, and the poems became the lasting form of their love. The dancer wove this story into her own choreography. She wears the white Gaksi mask (각시탈), the bride mask of the Hahoe Byeolsingut Talnori tradition, over her face as she sleeps and dreams. A love letter arrives. She reads it in private joy, and then comes the turn: the beloved must go. When she pushed the mask to the back of her head, she explained afterward, it became memory itself, the face of a happiness she carries behind her.
Her twin fans, trailing long sheets of sheer white silk painted with ink, became wings, waves, and letters never sent. When she knelt at the center of the floor with the fabric pooled around her like spilled moonlight, the masks on the wall behind her became an audience of ancestors, the laughing ones and the demure ones watching a story they have watched for five hundred years.
The performance’s vocabulary reaches back further than the Joseon romance it tells. In Korean shamanic traditions, called Musok or Muism, the indigenous, non-institutionalized religion of Korea, long white cotton cloths are unrolled during gut rituals, where shamans-often female ancestral mudangs, use rhythmic music, dance, song, and ritual offerings as bridges and roads connecting the human realm to the ancestors and gods. The dancer’s white hanbok and streaming silk belong to the lineage of Salpuri, the solo purification dance built on three movements, to bind, to soothe, and to release, which untangles deep sorrow, han, and converts it into joy, heung. The masks on the wall descend from talchum, the mask dance tradition inscribed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage. Korea classifies these forms as intangible heritage because they live in bodies, passed down through generations of practice, and because they have always belonged to the people. Watched with that lineage in mind, the love story became a binding, a soothing, and a release.
Beside MiYoung knelt calligrapher and painter KyoungMug Park, in a white hanbok, writing on a long bolt of cloth laid across the floor as she danced, brush and body answering each other in real time. Park also painted the fans themselves, and in the Q&A he described choreographing his brushwork into the piece deliberately: he wanted the painted silk to scatter and fly like flower petals, fragments of the love story lifting off together.
Park works with one forearm and one hand. He is physically disabled. Nothing in the performance announced this. The work simply appeared, stroke by stroke, the way the moon appears in Yun Seondo’s poem: present, luminous, and silent about its own difficulty. By the end, the ink-covered cloth had become the performance’s memory, left lying on the floor for the audience to read.
The poetry underneath
Two sijo anchored the gallery’s Art Fair presentation, chief among them “The Moon,” from Ouga (Song of Five Friends), composed in 1642 by the greatest master of the form, Yun Seondo:
“Small, yet rising high, you shine upon all things. What other light in the night could equal you? You see all and remain silent, so I call you my friend.”
Yun Seondo wrote Ouga in political exile, naming water, stone, pine, bamboo, and the moon as his five true companions. Sijo’s structure of theme, development, and a final turn was also the structure of the evening: observation, deepening, and the quiet twist where silence becomes friendship, or a mask becomes memory.
The lineage is wider than one poet. It includes Hwang Jin-i, the legendary sixteenth-century gisaeng poet who imagined cutting a long winter night in half and rolling it up beneath her blanket to unroll on the night her lover returned. It includes Heo Nanseolheon, whose poems of longing were celebrated abroad only after her death at twenty-six. Their voices of desire, patience, and endurance were all somewhere in the room.
The exhibit: landscapes made of paper, ink, and cardboard
The performance unfolded inside the work of the three artists the gallery brought to the fair, and the work shares its philosophy.
MiYoung Margolis builds her Landscape series from hanji, Korea’s traditional mulberry paper, layered with wire mesh, gold leaf, and plaster cloth, joining traditional Korean materials and technique with new forms. From a distance the large works read as pale mountain valleys. Up close they are all fiber and scar, terrain you could almost touch your way across. Smaller relief pieces, crumpled and snow-white, hang like fragments of mountains that folded themselves.
Her latest Fifth Landscape series created quite a buzz at the Seattle Art Fair, and one work was purchased on sight. The works reinforced the themes of the Korean Rhapsody performance, within shades of white, cream, and vanilla mulberry: her artistic manifestations of wild femininity, wilderness, the sacred, earth, water, and ridges.
KyoungMug Park’s Dokdo Series renders Korea’s easternmost islands in ground ink on hanji: dark volcanic silhouettes doubled by soft reflections, floating in fields of cream. As the exhibition’s director’s note explains, Park transforms his experience of visiting Dokdo into a meditation on memory and presence, the island as resilience and the enduring bond between a people and a place. The stillness in these works holds the weight of history.
A particular contemporary trend in Korean diasporic art is to pay homage to Silla and Joseon ceramics and porcelain by painting them into two-dimensional forms of visual art. Park’s portrait of a Joseon era porcelain vase is made in textural black, showing dimension, presence, and depth within its two dimensions, and a viewer may imagine a flaw in the kiln firing, a cobalt overlayer, that isn’t there, but is implied, as a ghost, within the black depths.
At the Seattle Art Fair, the Dokdo inks drew steady audience engagement amongst the crowds. The series of small ink paintings, black on cream hanji, reflects nostalgia and love for the homelands of Korea, islands administered by Korea and woven into Korean life since time immemorial. The dispute is not history. On August 4, 2026, days after the fair closed, Japan renewed its territorial claim to Dokdo in its annual defense white paper, the twenty-second consecutive year it has done so. Korea’s Foreign Ministry summoned the deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul the same day to lodge a strong protest, restating that Dokdo is Korean territory historically, geographically, and under international law, and demanding the claim’s immediate withdrawal.
The Korean case rests on the documents that ended the war. Japan incorporated Dokdo in 1905, in the opening stage of its colonization of Korea. The 1943 Cairo Declaration pledged that Japan would be expelled from all territories taken by violence and greed, and Korea recovered the islets with liberation in 1945. In the 1951 Treaty of Peace, Japan renounced all right, title, and claim to Korea. In the view of the Korean government and Korean legal scholars, each renewed claim to Dokdo breaks faith with that renunciation: a Japan that gave up Korea gave up Dokdo with it. Japan leans on the treaty’s silence about Dokdo by name; Korea answers that the treaty named none of the thousands of Korean islands it returned, and did not need to. Dokdo remains an intangible part of Korean identity and sovereignty, and Park’s inks carry that inheritance quietly and insistently.
YoungHwa Choi builds her works, with titles like Keep Going and Homeward Wind, from flattened Amazon and Nike boxes, resin, ink, and in one case an LED moon glowing through Korean paper. There are traces of hanji-craft interspersed in ribbons, if one knows to look. Discarded cardboard becomes bamboo leaves, mountain ridges, calligraphic tangles. Her material carries her message of persistence and transformation, and a refusal to treat anything, or anyone, as disposable.
During the artists’ circle at Gallery B612, Choi expressed shyness and discomfort with describing her processes and emotions in front of an audience. Her art speaks for itself, however. The ubiquity of Amazon products, on disposable cardboard, driven by consumerism and corporatism, is made dimensional and artful as part of the Pacific Northwest’s immemorial landscape, with taqʷuʔman, the Mountain known as Mount Rainier in English, and seoye (서예) calligraphy.
White as presence
During the Q&A, an audience member asked about all the white: the costumes, the fabric, the hanji. The answer reached back into history. Koreans once wore many colors, but the people became known for dressing in white, the baegui minjok, the white-clad folk. White in Korea carries meaning of its own. It is the color of purity and light, of mourning worn to honor the dead, and, in ink painting, of yeobaek, the deliberate empty space that is composed as carefully as any brushstroke. In that tradition, the unpainted paper already belongs to the image, holding its breath.
White is also the color of the sacred and the communal. The shaman’s white cloth road in a gut carries souls between worlds. The Salpuri dancer’s pure white hanbok and scarf are the instruments of purification itself. In Seungmu, the monk’s dance, the white peaked hood, the gokkal, signifies asceticism and the clear, emptied mind, a spiritual emptiness that is a form of attainment. Across ritual, dance, music, and calligraphy, white is the uniform of practices kept alive in bodies: indigenous, intangible, and for the people.
The artists carried this into their own metaphor: white as a canvas on which you can build your story, personal or cultural, ancient or new. The pleated paper wall holding the masks, the bolt of cloth receiving the ink, the hanji becoming mountains, the gallery floor carrying the dancer. Each was white doing what white does in Korean art, which is to hold everything.
When a young artist in the audience asked how to stand out and truly connect with people, the answer was the same philosophy in practical form. Never stop working. Keep telling your story in whatever medium carries it: paint, dance, ink. Do the work before anyone is watching. When opportunities appear, jump in. Over time the fragments become a body of work, and the audience finds you.
A room full of art-fair visitors fell completely silent as a fan traced slow circles over wet calligraphy. The moon doesn’t need to speak to be called a friend.
