The Painter of Life
Upon reading a newspaper advertisement, 23-year-old Eun Nim Ro came to Germany to work as a nurse in 1970 – and would become the first Korean artist to be a professor at a German academic institution, namely the Fachhochschule Hamburg.1
Born in Jeonju, South Korea, in 1946, Eun Nim Ro first studied medicine at the Seoul National University in 1966 at her parents’ wish; she dropped out after her mother’s sudden passing. Eun Nim Ro started painting in pursuit of having a portrait of her mother, but quitted shortly after: she had attended painting courses in a culture center that had a strong focus on hyper-realism. She got tired of this practice of zooming in on pictures and copying them precisely, so she stopped attending the course. She did, however, continue to paint because she didn’t want the paint she bought to go to waste. As a result, she created her first artistic works during her time as a medical development assistant in the border area to North Korea.
Painting never stopped for Eun Nim Ro, even when she was working as a nurse assistant in Hamburg. She would pick up a paintbrush to ease her loneliness and hid the paintings under her bed. One day, a fellow nurse discovered them and arranged an exhibition for her. With this, Eun Nim Ro enrolled at HFBK Hamburg in 1973 and studied under professors Hans Thiemann and Kai Sudeck until 1979.2
Her studies were not easy at first. As she recounts herself: “I was very timid in the beginning. Professor Thiemann asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I just came here because I was said to come. I don’t know what to do.’ I started drawing birds with a pencil a student handed me. After everyone left, I kept drawing and threw it in the trash. But one day, the professor showed it to the students. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen a drawing like this in my 30 years as a professor.’ Even now, I think about that moment when I teach students. ‘Why did he take my drawing out of the trash?’”3 The artist continued to paint throughout her life, following Professor Thiemann’s advice to paint as he told her to do.4
During her time at the HFBK Hamburg, she developed an intuitive painting style that combined the tradition of Korean ink brush painting with the expressive gestures of western art, as the biographical note on the artist puts it.5 While working, she said, a “spiritual guest” would come, so that her work was born in a way similar to pregnancy and birthing.6 She would go through a passionate process of drawing, painting, throwing, and pressing. This technique exhibited the influence of German Expressionism that she had learned from her professors while also showing Eastern traits, in the guise of brushstrokes and bold blank spaces reminiscent of ink-and-wash paintings.7 Eun Nim Ro’s work was not limited to paintings, but extended to other artistic media such as sculpture, ceramics, performances, and installations. In the late 1990s, she created works for public spaces, including designs for the glass windows of St. Johannes Altona in Hamburg in 1997 and light walls for administrative buildings in Seoul in 1998/99. She was also involved in a number of prestigious group exhibitions such as the BDI Award Winner, Ars Viva presentation at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin (1985), the Biennial of Peace (Biennale des Friedens, Kunstverein und Kunsthaus Hamburg, 1985), and the 5th International Biennial of Paper Art, Leopold-Hoesch-Museum, Düren, Germany (1994). Moreover, in 1990, she had a solo exhibition at Berlin’s House of World Cultures.8
After receiving several scholarships, Eun Nim Ro accepted a professorship in the Design Department at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in 1990, where she would stay until 2010, specializing in “Color and Form.” From 1994 to 2009, she was the artistic director of the international summer academy Pentiment which is associated with the institution. In 2016, she served as a chair professor at Seoul Women’s University. Her teaching was largely influenced by her own approach to art, viewing creative work as a direct “act of action,” something that does not follow a word, rule, task, or purpose, as the HAW’s obituary called it, describing her approach as “characterized by a love for humans and for nature, yet serious and profound, blending Far Eastern sign language and Western cultural elements in joyful simplicity.”9 Or in her own words: “I didn’t teach. I gave opportunities to see. If you lived blind and opened your eyes, imagine how much there would be to see? I made them feel the constantly changing nature and the life it contains. I taught colors, but what I taught was that there is no ugly color in the world. If it looks ugly, it’s because it lacks some other color next to it. You have no idea how many colors even white and black have within them. Many colors mix together to become black like silk, and even a single white rose contains all kinds of colors. It's not visible from the outside. You have to look within to see it.”10
Eun Nim Ro’s use of paper made from mulberry trees and rice plants was not only the material for her drawings and mixed-media techniques, but also a means of expression and design. This closeness to nature and its materials is reflected in her choice of subjects which she drew from Korean fairy tales and mythology. With her dynamic style, Eun Nim Ro transformed fishes, birds, trees and human figures into symbols and forms that portray nature as a continuous cycle which makes her paintings resonate with a unique energy full of life, as an article about her works describes it.11 Eun Nim Ro visualized this energy with dots. According to the artist, dots were the eyes of life. Life was added to her works by drawing eyes – these dots came together to form lines, which were then reborn as the objects of nature.12 The artist’s habit of adding dots to her clothes and shoes and wearing them can be seen as an act of bringing her life closer to art, filling it with energy.13
“If you draw a dot, that dot becomes a line, and the line becomes a circle. This brings us back to the starting point… Nature continues to cycle even without me,” she once said.14 Eun Nim Ro displayed this power of life through her entire career. She passed away on October 18, 2022, at the age of 76. In order to commemorate her life and work, The Goldene Hand Art Museum was built in the city of Paju-si, Gyeonggi-do region, South Korea. It is supported by the artist’s passionate fans, known as the “People Who Love Eun Nim Ro.” The museum’s purpose is to expose more people to her work and offer comfort through the pure world within it. The museum is currently displaying the archives of the artist, sharing her attitude towards her life and art.
This article was published in February 2025.
