Kwon began his career at a time when traditions of visual representation, particularly their connotations of national identity, were under scrutiny. Japanese colonial rule of Korea had ended in 1945, Seoul National University was founded in 1946, and the following year, at the age of 21, Kwon left his family home in Yangju to begin his studies at the university. He enrolled in the Eastern Painting department, which existed alongside the oil-on-canvas-focused Western Painting program. The teachers and students in the Eastern Painting department were faced with the difficult task of reestablishing standards for Korean painting that were distinct from the styles developed under Japanese colonial rule, without reverting to an antiquarian interest in traditional Chinese methods.

One of Kwon’s teachers, Chang Woo-sung (1912–2005), was among a number of artists at the time who had turned away from Japanese academic styles toward a form of pastoral lyricism in search of uniquely Korean subject matter, producing works such as Returning Shepherd (1935), a paint-on-silk depiction of a boy leading a cow across a field. In Chang’s composition, emblematic of his mature style, the boy and animal are pushed close to the picture plane and rendered with exacting detail, drawing attention to the boy’s straw shoes, simple white clothing and other elements emphasizing the humble, everydayness of the scene, which could not be mistaken for the highly formal imagery of Japanese painting.

Kwon’s reputation as a progressive ink painter grew throughout the 1960s, with his work regularly appearing in the annual National Exhibition. Several other Korean artists were taking an experimental approach to ink at this time, most notably Suh Se-ok (father of contemporary artist Do-Ho Suh), who founded the Ink Forest Group in 1959, a collective of Korean painters interested in stripping ink painting of old connotations and exploring its potential for abstraction. Kwon resisted alignment with this group, however, and in 1962 he contributed pieces to the National Exhibition that seemed to declare his separation from ink altogether: the works consisted of undecorated paper that was torn, layered and scratched apart by the artist’s fingernails. Kwon did not title these works, a practice he would employ from that point on; instead, he assigned them ordinal numbers based on the years in which they were made. 

For the next several years Kwon developed his technique of working in paper on paper, and he elicited a strong critical response in 1966 when he mounted a solo exhibition of these works at Shinsegae Gallery in Seoul. The works were pared-down, consisting simply of white paper glued on brown panels, using only the most austere abstract language. His work Untitled (1965), for example, has a simple layout: its surface consists of individual squares of rice paper overlapping to form a grid. The squares are arranged in a way that emphasizes the rice paper’s translucency and pliability: some areas of the grid consist of multiple layers, appearing more opaque, and others are torn open to reveal the layer beneath. Works such as this pushed the limits of what the Korean art community was willing to consider “Asian painting,” but Kwon shrugged off the question of national identity and artistic style. He would later tell the Korean daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo, in 1977, that he considered himself “neither an Eastern nor Western artist,” and referred to his works simply as “white paintings.” 

By this time Kwon had arrived at a tentative answer to the earlier questions of his teachers: if contemporary enactments of tradition could not rely on older forms of representation, they could at least turn toward material—the basic element underlying representation—as a new source of aesthetic value. The works he had shown at Jacques Massol Gallery enacted this stance, consisting of bright, white layered paper, scraped and torn in an exploration of the material’s physical properties. Kwon’s treatment of his medium fit into the renewed interest in materials seen in the work of various Post-Minimalist artists such as Richard Tuttle. The American artist was widely exhibiting in Europe during these years, having drawn considerable attention with pieces such as W-Shaped Yellow Canvas (1967), a span of unstretched canvas dyed, cut and sewn into an abstract geometric form roughly resembling an upturned “W”— the traditional Western support apprehended as a raw object. The American painter Edda Renouf, another expatriate working in Paris at the same time as Kwon, was also focusing on surface. In Resonance I (1979), Renouf systematically removes threads from a linen support, forming a textured, overall composition as the paint catches on the disturbed cloth. Kwon’s material experiments in France, evolving from his initial experiences in postwar Korea, fit into what was by now a widespread, international artistic investigation. 

Other Korean artists, in addition to Kwon, were also moving along this trajectory. For a brief period he and the painter Chung Sang-hwa lived in the same building in Paris, and both continued to send new pieces back to Seoul for exhibitions. Like Kwon, Chung favored large, systematic compositions. Working in many layers of paint, Chung would create rough, grid-like patterns by carefully cutting into and stripping away the accumulated medium on his canvases. Their works appeared alongside one another in exhibitions in Korea that elaborated on the monochrome tendency first highlighted in “Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White,” including “White Exhibition: Eight Contemporary Korean Artists” at Seoul’s Institut Français in 1984 and “Black & White in Korean Art Today” at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in 1987. Throughout the ’80s they, and other Dansaekhwa artists, continued to play off of the observations and interests of the Korean art world while engaging with developments abroad.

After more than a decade abroad, Kwon returned to South Korea in 1989, setting up his studio in rural Yongin, 40 kilometers south of Seoul. The following year, he was given an exhibition showing more than 100 of his works from his time in Paris at the Ho-Am Gallery (now the Leeum Samsung Museum), the city’s most esteemed exhibition venue. The show was praised by the Joongang Daily, which described his work as “going beyond the forms and conventions of Eastern painting to seek a new world of abstraction.” Shortly after this Kwon began to produce his next series of works, as he continued his explorations into the interaction of paper with wet media. For these works, such as his series from 1992, Kwon would fold or crumple a large sheet of rice paper and lay it over a large panel that had been set on the floor and covered in a layer of paint. The paint would permeate the paper in the places where it came into contact with the panel; Kwon would then press more of the paper onto the panel, creating a pattern of pigment that echoes the topology of the paper’s surface. As with his works in ink and gouache from Paris, this series combines natural processes (the absorption of pigment into paper) with a single intervention into the material (crumpling and folding the paper). Kwon had described his working process as a reciprocal relationship with nature. “Nature is truly beautiful and plausible. But even in nature, some parts seem awkward or could be improved,” Kwon wrote in an artist’s statement in 2011. “My work is to discover, select and fix what is in nature.” Kwon’s process in these series demonstrates this kind of approach; he finds a basic trait of a material (the translucency of paper, its interaction with water) and creates works that reveal those traits in their most basic forms, selectively involving himself in the process in order to draw out and elaborate on the patterns that appear.

In the last decades of his career, Kwon once again removed ink from his artwork, returning to the white surface of paper that had been the focus of his work from the 1970s. The removal of pigment coincided with a shift toward sculpture; Kwon began to use objects in his work, which he had done occasionally in the 1960s though not nearly as exhaustively. He favored simple, everyday objects: disposable spoons, plastic bottles, nails. He would arrange these objects across a flat surface, most often into neat rows or packed into an allover pattern, and encase the whole arrangement in a layer of fine, bright white paper. 

The way Kwon dealt with objects in these works still resembles some of the strategies of representation used by his teachers: like Chang Woo-sung’s Returning Shepherd, Kwon’s mixed-media compositions take evidence of ordinary life and rearrange it with precision, pushing these details to the surface of the picture plane and toward the viewer. At the same time the arrangements fall into the vein of Pop art, re-presenting mass-produced articles. Kwon’s use of paper, though, lends these arrangements an air of reverence: he adored the unique way that light interacted with the surface of paper (a gentle dispersal of light rather than the more direct reflections of paint), and he used these objects to create a three-dimensional surface to draw out the interaction of light and paper. One untitled work from this series, an arrangement of crushed bottles created in 2000, achieves this effect strongly: the objects are abstracted twice, once through being crushed and again through being encased in white paper. The resulting surface is thickly contoured, with some areas bearing crisp impressions of bottle caps and others crumpled into abstract forms. It combines plays of light and shadow, flatness and depth, abstraction and legibility.

If the question of the distinction between Eastern and Western painting is what defined the first half of Kwon’s career, it was the distinction between painting and sculpture that drove the second half. For his exhibition for the Artist of the Year prize in 1998, at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Gwacheon, Kwon underscored this change in his practice, showing mostly works that combine objects and pure, white paper. Even at age 73, he seemed to be implying that he was not done refining and reinventing himself. But just as this exhibition declared a radical turn in style, it also served as a celebration of the medium that had always been the guiding thread of his work. 

Despite the number of times Kwon pushed himself in new directions, paper provided a fundamental aesthetic orientation. It was a way to engage with tradition and maintain consistency without being bound to a single canon or worldview. When asked in 1982 by art critic Kim Bok-young about what drew him to the medium, Kwon replied: “When one shakes off everything and returns to white paper, the viewer is invited to consider a new world. Isn’t this what true abstraction means?” Paper, before it is marked, bears no content that can be ascribed to one tradition or another; Kwon used this multivalence to dissolve distinctions between places, times and genres while remaining identifiably himself.