Haejin Park: Imaginer

Every day, Haejin Park's grandmother, now in hospital and nearing the end of her life, shuffles her pack of red-backed Korean picture cards, Hwatu, also known as 'War of Flowers'. These cards, no bigger than a matchbox, feature plants, birds and animals and are categorised according to seasonal flowers; like May – the water iris. They are used to play games such as Go-Stop, and sometimes for betting.

Her grandmother looks at these cards to decide whether she will have a good day or not. Part of a generation of Korean women who never learned to read or write, and despite failing sight, she uses these images to see the future.

In Park’s extraordinary new series of paintings, Imaginer, we find watercolours on canvases, arranged and rearranged. Watercolours on card. Drippy, liquid inks have diffused and feathered on wet surfaces into suggestive, bright semi-fluorescent polymorphic shapes. Many contain blurry flower-forms.

We forget that water is a material; a prima materia in philosophy, but also in art. Always shifting in its composition as it absorbs fragments of the world, water is also a medium – what it carries with it. Park’s close work with this medium in her paintings, channelling and guiding it, reminds me of the ancient art of hydromancy (divination by water). One method, described by the Roman writer Varro, involved scrying water to see colours and figures emerge – sometimes in fountains. Pools of water are also the first mirrors we looked into, long ago. But Imaginer as a speculative practice of visioning, like War of Flowers, draws from far below the surface in this activity.

We forget that water is layered, like how the mesmerising sunlit sea that trembles reflections transforms under pressure and darkness as we descend into the abyssal and hadal zones. Soft, hard, clear, murky. ‘There is this place I want to go in painting / It is a world before words and colors / Like throwing fire underwater,’ writes Park in an accompanying poem. She is partly thinking of brine pools, hypersaline lakes formed in craters on the ocean floor that are separate from the water around them. Only microbes can survive in their toxic waters – a water snake starts to ripple across, and dissolves.

Scrying in a brine pool, a hidden underworld – almost another world.

There are the Upper Waters of formless potentiality, and the Lower Waters of the potentiality of form, says my book of symbols.

The potentiality of form is also a way of describing decay, our gradual melting and dissolving into the outside. ‘Seawater is an inhuman water,’ says Gaston Bachelard in Water and Dreams. In Imaginer from under the surface of the brine pool colours rise, then outlines of fecund semi-figurative forms; bubbling, blossoming, decomposing, semi-skeletal – almost-living, almost-dead.

Some are women, or like women – one reclining inside the greenness of decomposition is surrounded by a spectral cloud of fireflies, or drifting snowy plankton. Their delicate shapes are formed by salt that Park sprinkles on the surface – like the brine pools it dissolves and erodes.

All the paintings in Imaginer have a sensation of iridescence, somehow, as if made of liquid nacre (mother-of-pearl).

Water grows as it spills and blurs. As you move through Imaginer, the paintings’ suggestive figurative forms on canvas become more abstract and fugitive, held by paper. Bubbles and circles spread outwards – coral pink, toxic magenta, splatters of snow whale blue (these are Park’s colour-names). Sometimes they seem like translucent bubble people, flowers growing inside them like fluorescent organs.

Park is not an abstract expressionist, though her works like Pollock’s drip paintings engage with fluid materials and process. She is also not a figurative artist – something in-between.

A diviner, a speculator, a mystic. Who asks us to look. Just look closer at what is happening.

‘[…] two are enough, one reflects the reflection of what the other reflected, in a trembling that is transmitted in an intense and mute telegraphic message, insistent, liquidity in which you can plunge a fascinated hand and pull it out dripping with the reflections of that hard water that is the mirror.’ This is from Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, a formative text.

I read that Go-Stop, one of the games you can play with War of Flowers, is also a fishing card game. These intervals in which images emerge – a shuffling card, a painting on wet paper from which colours and forms appear, drawn out by water and salt; the possibility of transversing spacetime, layers, the prescribed order of things—

The soul in particles emerges through the refractions of the other; flowers, debris, colours, figures in the water.

Lucy Mercer is a writer and editor. Her essay on wax and mortality, Afterlife, is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions, and her writing on art and literature has been published in Art Review, Granta, INQUE, LA Review of Books, Poetry Review, and The White Review among others. Her first poetry collection Emblem (Prototype, 2022) was awarded Poetry Book Society Choice. She is the co-editor of Too Little, Too Hard (Peninsula Press, 2026) a collection of essays on writing, work and value, and an Associate Editor at Ocula. 

Text © Lucy Mercer

All works © Haejin Park