Park Je Chun (박재천, 朴在千) is a Seoul-born drummer and percussionist, a free-improvisation player who sets Korean rhythm patterns on a drum kit. He is billed "Park Je Chun" on his own albums and on Discogs; Korean newspapers romanize the same name as Park Jae-chun or Park Jae-cheon, and the Hong Kong label Noise Asia writes "Jechun Park". Korean sources, including the Today-an news site, give his birth year as 1961 and his birthplace as Seoul. He began on snare drum in an elementary-school marching band, and the same profile lists a school band, a music-college course in classical composition, a military band and an orchestra before free music. A Dutch review on VPRO says he started as a rock drummer in a well-known band.

He studied composition at Chung-Ang University and learned Korean traditional music alongside it. Today-an says he learned the full pansori Simcheongga and the Jindo ssitgimgut and samulnori rhythms; a 2012 concert notice says he and his partner went looking for musical material at shamanic rituals and studied with traditional masters. According to the Jeonbuk Ilbo, he began his career in 1991 as a percussionist and as a planner of project ensembles. A 2012 notice for his New York concert says he played percussion in the United States in the early 1990s and that the saxophonist Kang Tae Hwan urged him to come home and concentrate on improvised music. The liner notes of Loose Community call him a former member of Kang's band and one of his students.

His partner in the duo Miyeon & Park is the pianist Miyeon (미연), his wife. She plays piano and synthesizer on his 1996 debut Mol-e Mori (AD.forte), and sources date the duo from 1996 or from 1999. In 2002 and 2003 they recorded with Kang as a trio: Improvised Memories was recorded live to two-track DSD on December 22, 2002, and Isaiah is a single 49-minute performance from March 19, 2005. Park also produced Kang's Seven Breath (2002) and the double album Sorefa (2011).

His own albums reach well outside Korea. Mol-e Mori II (2001) gathers live recordings from 1996 to 1999 and includes the pianist Masahiko Satoh, Kang, and the American trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Loose Community (Improvised Music From Japan, 2003) is a trio with Otomo Yoshihide and Miyeon; the liner notes say Otomo first heard Park in a small Tokyo club, in a duo set with Kang. 2 Souls in Seoul (Leo Records, 2008) is a set of 17 short duets with the vocalist Lauren Newton, recorded at Yeheum Studio in Seoul on December 5, 2006. Meeting Point with the pianist Simon Nabatov was recorded at Buam Art Hall in Seoul on July 22, 2006, and Afterimages is a live duo with Satoh from August 21, 2010, issued by Satoh's BAJ Records in 2012.

The Miyeon & Park duo's Dreams From the Ancestor (Audioguy, 2008) won Best Crossover Album and Best Instrumental Album at the Korean Music Awards in 2009, the sixth edition. Their earlier Queen & King (2005) was ranked by Jazz People magazine among the top ten Korean jazz albums of the 21st century, according to a Google Arts and Culture feature on Korean music. Both records were reissued as a two-CD set by Noise Asia in 2016. The duo's pieces mix piano and percussion improvisation with Korean ritual and folk material, and they also play in the ensemble Yesanjok with the samulnori master Lee Kwang-soo.

Park has described his working method as the "Korean Grip": playing Korean jangdan rhythms on a drum kit and on foreign percussion. He plays a custom set that mixes Korean and Western instruments, seated on the floor. His solo album Park Je Chun's Korean Grip (Audioguy, 2015) and the percussion duo Records & Recordings with Kim Cheong-man (2015) were both supported by the Jeonju International Sori Festival.

Outside the studio he has been one of the main organizers of Korean improvised music and, for nearly a decade, of a major traditional-music festival. From 2005 he has directed Seoul Meeting Free Music (SMFM), an improvisation collective, and Today-an says he also produced a series of concerts by Korean jazz musicians. He was programmer of the Jeonju International Sori Festival in 2011, directed its opening performance in 2013, and served as its executive director from May 2014. He was reappointed in 2017 and again on May 20, 2020, and held a farewell ceremony on February 28, 2023, as the festival's new organizing chairman took office. In 2017 he was general director of the World Taekwondo Championships at Muju. Today-an says he has made 19 albums and been invited to perform in more than 40 countries, including Poland's Jazz Topaz festival and the Sinar festival in Canada, and that he composed the main theme "Yeoin" for the KBS drama Taeyangin Lee Je-ma. A 2020 Seoulbeats profile of the saxophonist Kim Oki says Kim played with SMFM, a group led by Park.

Discogs also files two early albums under his name, Devil Music (SRB Records, 1987) and 四柱八字 (Seoul Records, 1991), both electronic and new-age in style, and a handful of other sideman credits; they are listed in the full discography.

Park is an improviser first. Discogs tags his leader releases Free Improvisation, Free Jazz and Avant-Garde Jazz, and the Korean Music Awards filed the duo's prizewinning album under crossover. The common thread is rhythm taken from Korean ritual and folk music and played on drums and percussion: the piece titles on Records & Recordings and Saeng name traditional rhythm patterns (jinyang, joongmori, gutgeori, jajinmori, eotmori and dosalpuri), and the Yesanjok album reworks Arirang and a dosalpuri shaman piece.

He works across very different settings. Worship is solo percussion. Queen & King sets themes credited to Satoh, to the percussionist Masahiko Togashi and to the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen ("Hoketus") beside the duo's own pieces, so the contemporary-composition side of his training shows. With Lauren Newton the pieces are short, none longer than about six and a half minutes, and with Kang they are long single performances.