Born in Korea in 1926, Park In-kyung studied at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. Within the university’s Oriental Painting Department, she acquired the foundations of figurative ink painting. From an early stage, she sought to move beyond the conventions of academic teaching and develop a more personal form of expression. Her encounter with the work of Lee Ungno in 1949 - who would later become her husband - was a revelation and marked the beginning of an artistic inquiry grounded in freedom of gesture and the simplification of forms.
Settling permanently in France in the late 1950s, she continued her artistic activities at the Académie de peinture orientale de Paris, founded by Lee Ungno in 1964. While devoting a significant part of her time to the Academy and her family, Park In-kyung nevertheless continued to paint and developed a remarkably rich body of work. From then on, her practice evolved through a dialogue between the legacy of Korean tradition and Western modernity.

Moving between figuration and abstraction, the artist explored the expressive possibilities of line, texture, density and gesture. From the 1960s, her work incorporated elements of Tachisme and forms inspired by nature and Korean folk art. In the 1980s, writing became an important component of her compositions, with fragments of newspapers, novels, biblical texts and her own poems transformed into visual and material elements. These gradually evolved into evocative landscapes crossed by paths and waterways.

A central theme of her work is the relationship between emptiness and fullness, a fundamental principle of traditional Asian painting. ​

Over the years, her compositions became increasingly dense, with ink and colour gradually saturating the surface, while black took on a predominant role and became, in the artist’s words, an expression of emptiness and absence.

Her practice is characterised by a remarkable continuity in artistic experimentation. From calligraphy to abstraction, from landscape to writing, from wash painting to compositions saturated with ink, Park In-kyung has continually renewed her artistic language while maintaining a profound connection with Korean tradition.

For her, art is a discovery, an intimate search in which gesture, material and nature become languages of thought and emotion. Her landscapes are therefore not simply representations of nature, but spaces for contemplation and expressions of inner life.