The Naked Tree

Lee Kyung takes a job at the American PX during the Korean War hand-tinting cheap portraits GIs send home, work that trades entirely on sentiment and speed rather than skill, and finds herself drawn to Ok Hui-do, an older painter reduced to the same commercial grind despite training as a serious artist before the war scattered his career along with everything else. Park Wan-suh, who worked a nearly identical PX job herself as a young woman, gives Kyung a crush that is really a form of hope: if a man this evidently gifted can be surviving inside such a degraded trade, then art itself might have survived the war too, buried rather than destroyed.

Kyung's fascination with Ok is complicated rather than resolved by a quieter, steadier affection from a colleague at the PX, whose devotion she never fully returns and barely lets herself examine, and by her jealousy of Ok's wife, who represents a domestic stability Kyung both envies and doesn't quite want for herself. The novel is less interested in resolving this triangle than in using it to keep Kyung's attention fixed on the question of what, exactly, a person owes their own capacity to make something beautiful when survival is already using up everything they have.

Ok Hui-do is closely modeled on Park Soo-keun, a real Korean painter known for textured, muted depictions of ordinary postwar life, who did in fact work informally at a wartime PX doing portraits for American soldiers before his later work found real recognition. Park Wan-suh's own employment there gives the novel its documentary precision about the PX's specific commerce in sentiment, and reading Ok as a portrait of an artist she genuinely observed sharpens the novel's insistence that his commercial work was never a betrayal of his gift, only its most difficult surviving form.