At the 2024 Korea Culture Management Awards, literary painting artist Ji Sook-ja was honored in the Shin Saimdang category. She taught for 43 years and retired as principal of Uam Elementary School in Cheongju. She has been a wife who has provided proper support to her husband and an upright mother who has given warm love and discipline to her children. She has also been a passionate essayist for many years. 

A woman of her time, living a challenging and enterprising life

She is passionate beyond her years. In 2019, at the age of 77, she participated in the World Senior Queens Pageant. She won the Shin Saimdang Award for her orchid painting performance, wearing a hanbok with a hand-painted five-color design on her vest and skirt. For 20 years, she had been caring for her husband’s illness. Through dementia, stomach cancer surgery, femur surgery due to osteoporosis, and dehydration, she cared for him so intensely that she miraculously saved his life. She teaches literary painting, leads a research group on traditional brush strokes, and has fostered younger students. She won the grand prize at the 2023 Korea International Art Festival, won the grand prize in the literary painting category at the 2017 Grand Art Exhibition of Korea, served as an invited artist and judge at the Korea Art Exhibition, and as an invited artist in the literary painting category at the Chungcheongbuk-do Art Exhibition.

Shift from literary painting to passionate semi-abstract Korean painting

Her signature subject matter is the sea crab, which is part of a movement to save tidal flats. She has made a shift from literary painting to passionate semi-abstract Korean painting, achieving more fluid and colorful works. The Korean hermit crab looks more delicate and vivid. Her abstractions are storytelling, and nature is more vividly present in her works.

With the application of modern expression techniques, the semi-abstract and acrylic painted coloring techniques have been introduced together, and more active movements are felt. She has shown that literary patinting can push boundaries and incorporate new abstract worlds.