Rahm Parc (b. 1986) has explored various aspects of painterliness through a wide range of media, including drawing, painting, performance, sculpture, and installation. In particular, the artist translates digital language—used today as a kind of social subtext—into the language of painting, offering a glimpse into the mechanisms of contemporary thought. In recent years, Parc has been focusing primarily on painting as a medium to pursue this exploration.

Rahm Parc’s practice begins with an exploration of the validity of images and the potential of painting within a contemporary environment where virtuality and reality intermingle amid a flood of images. To this end, in the early stages of her career, Parc focused on the ways in which digital media—such as image editing software and various output devices—analyze and store physical data. She translated digital languages such as “scores,” “tables,” and “diagrams” into the formal languages of various media.
 
For instance, Meteorites (2014–2015), presented in her first solo exhibition, referenced the operational mechanisms of a 3D printer, which builds forms by stacking layers of material. In this work, Parc reconfigured elements of painting as a kind of “output device,” reinterpreting the process of painterly construction.

Alongside this, Rahm Parc has pursued various experimental projects as part of her ongoing inquiry into what it means—and how it is possible—to “see and paint with the mind” in today’s image-saturated world. Since 2014, her performance series ‘Drawing Exercise’ has embodied this inquiry. As the title suggests, the project begins with the creation of instructional prompts for “drawing exercise,” guiding participants to shape mental images through physical engagement, thereby encouraging alternative sensory experiences of a given time and space.
 
‘Drawing Exercise’ typically begins with participants carrying out basic drawing actions based on their physical movements across a gridded panel. It then evolves into a process of real-time image interpretation, in which participants select and respond to cues presented on a screen.

Throughout her practice, Rahm Parc has explored how the grammar of painting can be used to interpret contemporary images—those entangled in the overlap of the real and the virtual—by imaginatively engaging with what lies beyond the visible, and by appropriating the instrumental functions of digital devices and software into the realm of art.
 
In her early work, Parc approached painting indirectly, as though abstracting the "soul" of painting and carrying it through other forms—sculpture, performance, and installation—as a way of invoking painterly qualities across media. Since 2019, however, she has gradually synthesized these investigations into a more direct engagement with painting itself, continuing her exploration of painterliness in the form of painting.

Based on these inquiries, Rahm Parc’s solo exhibition 《Times》 (Kumho Museum of Art, 2020) marked a pivotal moment in which she developed a formal language to represent the multilayered space-time of the contemporary era, while also transitioning into the next phase of her research. In this exhibition, Parc approached painting as a symbolic linguistic system and a communicative tool, aiming to internalize and visually articulate the operations of computation that underpin today’s technological environment.

To explore this idea, the artist took inspiration from the structure of everyday spreadsheet programs, where each cell corresponds to a matrix of rows and columns. Based on this, Parc devised a visual language in which the “color” in painting functions as an index within a matrix.
 
Within this linguistic structure, each color field refers to and signifies another, operating as an arbitrary symbolic system that generates a dynamic movement of vision.

In the process of creating her work, Rahm Parc begins by producing a digital drawing using a spreadsheet program. She fills in each cell with color to construct an image within the digital interface, which then serves as a draft for painting onto canvases of various sizes and proportions.
 
However, rather than faithfully reproducing the digital image as it appears on screen, Parc layers her internal impressions—emergent through the tactile and contemplative experience of engaging with the digital form—onto the canvas.

The resulting paintings, rendered in standardized paint colors, are installed in a modular structure that forms part of the exhibition space’s walls. Using a stencil brush, Parc creates gradients within each color field, with each segment referencing and indexing cells in a matrix of colors. This generates a visual language that either converges toward an infinite vanishing point, produces a sense of kinetic energy, or evokes the optical sensation of ascending and descending steps.
 
For instance, Times (2019–2020), composed of eight canvases forming a large-scale surface, creates an illusion of clockwise motion, guiding the viewer’s gaze in a continuous loop.

Meanwhile, the two blue spheres of different sizes placed around the painting, Eye-Finger (2019–2020), embody a contemporary perceptual experience in which the eye and hand operate as a single interconnected organ.
 
Eye-Finger functions like a kind of scale that expands or contracts space, guiding the viewer to naturally zoom in from the outer exhibition hall into the inner exhibition space. It also directs the rows and columns of blue spheres located in another place, thereby transporting the viewer through space and time.

The work that transfers images from software onto physical crystals on canvas may appear like a schematic system processed through mechanical information handling, but in reality, it cannot be reduced to a rule that processes fixed inputs and outputs. The painting presented by the artist functions as a device that proposes and guides the free movement of images, flexibly stretching, folding, and unfolding the solid walls of the exhibition space—and even the firm dimensions of time and space—on the level of imagination, thereby reconstructing them.
 
A single color plane generates the movement of the gaze by indicating the coordinates of another space-time where that color is located. By creating such virtual images, Parc invites viewers to participate in the playful act of tracking and following the movement of this imagination.

In the 2021 exhibition 《Young Korean Artists 2021》 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Parc presented the painting series ‘AUTO’ (2021), which evokes the sensation and imagination of driving through nighttime streets. Hung on a black wall, these paintings recall the lights of traffic signals and car headlights on the road at night, creating a feeling as if one is riding in a moving vehicle.
 
In this work, Parc devised a system that uses coordinates in a matrix to assign colors and painted the series based on this order. By endlessly imagining the sequence and arrangement of colors in her mind, she conceived a “painting that unfolds progressively as one moves forward.”

In AUTO (Players) (2021), Rahm Parc incorporated the exhibition wall itself into the context of the artwork. She extended the blue paint, which forms the background of the painting, onto the exhibition wall, and painted a black rectangle in the left corner of the canvas to resemble an unpainted section of the wall.
 
The image, which multiplies in units like data within a formula, expands onto the black-painted wall, absorbing the entire exhibition space as part of the artwork. Visitors walk through the space with their bodies and traverse it mentally, freely imagining and drawing their own paths forward.
 
Through this, Rahm Parc presents a new spatial landscape that allows for free imagination—one that breaks away from today’s world where the boundary between reality and virtuality is increasingly blurred and everything is reduced to data.

Rahm Parc’s painting installation Pictures (2022), presented at 《The 22nd SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 held at SONGEUN the following year, was created as an experiment based on the question: “What if a painting could stand on its own without relying on the wall of a building?” Resembling a revolving door in a building lobby, the work invites viewers to imagine painting, sculpture, and performance along a single continuum.
 
Her paintings, which once extended onto the walls to dominate the entire space, now occupy part of the space independently, possessing a three-dimensional physical body. In doing so, this three-dimensional painting unfolds as a site where physical and mental spaces intertwine.

Rahm Parc’s work can be described as constructing an order of color through the structure of a matrix and painting the emotions that emerge from it. By reconfiguring the logic of digital computation—which predicts what comes next based on input data—within the context of painting, her work prompts the viewer to imagine another set of coordinates that lie beyond the visible frame of the canvas. 

What makes her painting distinctive is not simply the use of digital structures and sensibilities, but the way she introduces the unpredictable realm of emotion into preexisting logic and systems, subverting expectations and generating painterly imagination. Her experiments in pictoriality evoke in viewers images that expand infinitely—not just visually, but within the mind.

 “Rather than drawing what I’ve seen, I wanted to create something akin to perspective—something that could depict what is yet to be seen, the images held in the mind.”    (Rahm Parc, interview from 《Young Korean Artists 2021》 at MMCA)

Rahm Parc received her BFA in Visual Communication Design from Ga-cheon University and her MFA in Painting from Hongik University Graduate School. Her recent solo exhibitions include 《Wall Painting No.6》 (Caption Seoul, Seoul, 2024), 《AUTO Drive 3》 (021Gallery, Daegu, 2022), 《Seeing Seeing》 (The Export-Import Bank of Korea, Seoul, 2022), 《Blue, Blue》 (The Reference, Seoul, 2021), 《Times》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2020), and more.
 
Parc has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Take My Eyes Off》 (Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025), 《Warped Mesh》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2023), 《The 22nd SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2022), 《Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb》 (Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021), 《Young Korean Artists 2021》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Gwacheon, 2021), 《This Event》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2020), and 《The Best World Possible》 (Platform-L, Seoul, 2019).
 
Parc has been selected for several artist-in-residency programs, including K’ARTS Studio at Korea National University of Arts (2021–2022), the MMCA Goyang Residency (2020–2021), Incheon Art Platform (2019–2020), and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (2017–2018).

References

• 박아람, Rahm Parc (Artist Website)
• 인천문화통신 3.0, 박아람
• 더아트로, 소실점 없는 세계 - 박아람의 《타임즈》
• 금호미술관, 타임즈 (Kumho Museum of Art, Times)
• 한국수출입은행 세이프갤러리, 씽씽 (The Export-Import Bank of Korea, Seeing Seeing)
• 뮤클리, 동시대 미술의 현재이자 미래, “젊은 모색 2021” 인터뷰 2편, 2023.01.21
• 송은, 제22회 송은미술대상전 – 작품 설명 (SONGEUN, The 22nd SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition – Artwork Description)
• 서울시립미술관, 떨어지는 눈 – 참여 작가 소개: 박아람 (Seoul Museum of Art, Take My Eyes Off – Participating Artist: Rahm Parc)