How to Use Ink Wash Techniques From Korean Painting in Your Portfolio

Korean ink wash painting, sumukhwa (수묵화), is often presented to applicants as a cultural credential: something that makes a Korean portfolio look “authentic”. That framing undersells it. Ink wash is first of all a technical discipline. It trains the eye to see in values, the hand to commit to a mark, and the mind to decide what to leave out. Those are exactly the skills that US art schools look for in drawing, whatever the medium.

This guide treats ink wash as a practice rather than a label. It explains what the tradition is, how the tools work, which techniques have names worth learning, which masters to study, and — most usefully — how to turn ink into observational drawing and original work that fits the admissions rules of schools such as Pratt, RISD and SVA.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture defines sumukhwa simply: painting made without added colour, using the gradations of ink from dark to light. The entry divides the technique into two broad approaches, pamuk (파묵, “broken ink”) and balmuk (발묵, “splashed ink”), which we return to below. It also notes that literati painting, which developed in Northern Song China, adopted ink precisely for its plain and elegant qualities.

That link to literati painting (문인화) explains much of the tradition’s character. The same encyclopedia describes literati painting as work made by scholar-officials rather than professional painters, as an extension of learning rather than a trade. It valued sauui (사의) — conveying the inner meaning of a subject — above surface likeness. Ink landscape and the Four Gentlemen were its core subjects. For a student, this is the first useful idea: in ink wash, a mark is judged not only by accuracy but by what it expresses.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of Korean ink painting as purely expressive. Some of its greatest works are records of real places, observed and walked through. That combination of observation and expression is what makes the tradition so useful for a modern portfolio.

Korean scholars spoke of the munbang sau (문방사우), the “four friends of the study”. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture lists them as paper, brush, inkstone and ink — the four tools a scholar always handles.

A practical note: many beginners start with bottled liquid ink for convenience. That is fine for sketching, but grinding an ink stick is worth trying. It gives finer control over density and teaches you how much water changes a tone — the core skill of ink wash. Whichever you use, keep a strip of test paper beside your work and try every mixture before it touches the painting.

Naming techniques is not pedantry. Once you can name what you are doing, you can do it on purpose, and you can explain it in a portfolio description. The terms below are defined in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture unless noted.

Notice how closely several of these map onto Western drawing vocabulary. Nongdam is a value scale. Molgolbeop and gureukbeop are the old argument between mass and line. Junbeop is hatching with a philosophy. A student who can move between the two vocabularies is showing exactly the kind of informed thinking that a portfolio description should reveal.

The sagunja (사군자) — plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo — are the traditional first subjects of ink painting. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture explains them as symbols of the virtuous scholar and links each to a season: plum to spring, orchid to summer, chrysanthemum to autumn and bamboo to winter. The plum, it notes, is prized because it blooms first, braving the cold of early spring. The same source connects these subjects to calligraphic brushwork, which is why they served for centuries as brush training.

You do not need to become a sagunja painter. Treat the four subjects as a structured warm-up, much as a Western student might practise ellipses and cubes. Twenty minutes of orchid leaves will do more for brush control than an hour of hesitant drawing.

The works below are all held by major Korean collections and are easy to find in museum databases. They also show the range of the tradition, from quiet literati painting to large, observed landscapes.

Jeong Seon deserves special attention. The Met’s essay on Korean landscape painting describes him as the father of “true-view” landscape painting (진경산수), in which Korean painters depicted actual Korean scenery rather than idealised Chinese models. For an applicant, this is the bridge between tradition and admissions requirements: the most celebrated Korean ink painter built his reputation on painting what he could see.

Ink painting did not stop in the nineteenth century. Three artists show how far it has travelled.

• Lee Ungno (이응노, 1904–1989) settled in Paris in 1958 and developed a calligraphic abstraction. From 1981 he painted large series of ink crowds. The Lee Ungno Museum opened in Daejeon in 2007.
• Suh Se-ok (서세옥, 1929–2020) was the central figure of the Mungnimhoe (묵림회), an avant-garde group of young ink painters active from 1960 to 1964. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art holds his People (1979), ink on hanji.
• Park Dae Sung (박대성, b. 1945), a self-taught ink painter, has had a run of US exhibitions: “Virtuous Ink and Contemporary Brush” at LACMA (2022–23), “Ink Reimagined” at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum (2022–23), and “What Echoes in the Small Mountain” at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (December 2025 to July 2026).

For Korean students already at school in the United States, these exhibitions are a reminder that American museums take contemporary Korean ink seriously. They also raise the bar: a portfolio that uses ink should show a reason for choosing it, not just competence with it.

The plan below is designed to fit alongside other portfolio work. Each week produces sketchbook pages; the last two produce finished pieces.

Week 4 matters most. Painting a real street, a room or a tree in ink, as Jeong Seon painted Mount Inwang, turns a traditional medium into observational evidence. If you want to strengthen the drawing underneath, pair this plan with our guides to blind contour drawing, monochrome studies and setting up a plein air kit.

No leading art school names ink wash as a required or preferred medium. What they do publish is more useful: rules on observation and on originality.

Two conclusions follow. First, observational ink drawings count. RISD says observational work can be in any medium, and nothing in Pratt’s wording excludes ink. A confident ink drawing of a real object is observational work. Second, master copies do not belong among finished pieces. Copying Sehando or Inwangjesaekdo is a valuable exercise, but it belongs in a sketchbook, labelled as a study — not in the portfolio as your own work.

Most portfolios ask for somewhere between 10 and 20 pieces. Ink wash works best as a thread rather than a separate section: two or three observational ink drawings among your other observational work, one short original series, and one sketchbook spread that shows tonal studies and stroke drills. That spread tells an admissions reader that the finished pieces were earned.

Ink also pairs naturally with other Korean traditions. Folk painting offers saturated colour and symbolic vocabulary against ink’s restraint (see how to study Korean folk painting), and dancheong shows how pattern and colour worked in architecture (dancheong patterns in contemporary design). If you are still building basic drawing skills, the Bargue drawing exercises give the same kind of patient, structured training in a Western form.

Start with a single tonal scale and a page of orchid leaves. Then take ink outside and draw something real. If, after a few weeks, ink still feels like the right voice, build a short series around a question only you would ask. That is when a traditional medium stops being a credential and becomes your own.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Korean Culture (수묵화, 문인화, 문방사우, 먹, 종이, 준법, 몰골법, 구륵법, 사군자, 산수화, 이응노, 묵림회) · National Museum of Korea · Korea Heritage Service · MMCA · Leeum · UNESCO · The Met (Heilbrunn Timeline) · LACMA · Hood Museum of Art · Asian Art Museum · admissions pages of Pratt, RISD, SVA, SAIC and Parsons. Checked 30 September 2026.