LOS ANGELES — The train rolled into downtown’s Union Station on Sept. 21 at about 9:15 p.m., more than four hours behind schedule. The small crowd at the station, catatonic as a result of waiting since 5 o’clock, was soon roused from its stupor when Jheon Soocheon, wearing a black sweater and black khakis, emerged from a train car that was wrapped in a plastic tarp.

The news cameras zoomed in on Jheon, an internationally acclaimed artist from Korea, who was about to finish his latest project. The curly-headed 58-year-old then took a mop dipped in paint and ran a swath of gray paint in a straight line across several of the train cars. Others in the crowd picked up paintbrushes and began contributing their names and illustrations to this very public artwork. And so completed “The Moving Drawing of Jheon Soocheon: The Line That Crosses America.”

“I’ve never, ever seen anything like this,” said one Union Station commuter who takes the train every day.

“The Moving Drawing,” funded by South Korean corporate and government sponsors, was a monumental “participatory installation embracing visual arts, nature and technology,” according to Jheon.

The Moving Line of Jheon Soocheon” makes its way across the American landscape.

For eight days, Jheon and his friends and family traveled across the country aboard a chartered passenger train that had most of its cars covered in white plastic. The American landscape was Jheon’s canvas, and the train his brush, with which a transcontinental line would be drawn. The train left New York on Sept. 14, and took a scenic route to Los Angeles, with stops in Washington, D.C., Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and Albuquerque, to create its metaphoric line.

According to Chung Yeon-shim, the project’s New York-based curator, “This unmoored [sic] composite art form is inherently unpredictable, subject to the vagaries of weather, environmental conditions and individuals as well.”

Jheon regards the white color of the train as “a symbol of the unlimited potential of creativity. The white will be altered by the nature of the train’s passage through the environment, marked by the elements en route.”

“There were stares and gawks, and people howling, which you don’t see everyday,” said Ted Vollmer, chief of On-board Services for RailCruise America, the St. Louis-based company that operated the train for “The Moving Drawing.”

Jheon has completed large-scale public artworks before. In 1989, he created “The Moving Line on the Han River,” fashioning an installation of wood and fabric on the surface of the river in Seoul.

The Moving Line of Jheon Soocheon” makes its way across the American landscape.

There was one notable hitch in bringing “The Moving Drawing” to fruition. “[The plastic] had a profound impact on the train — [the train] could go no faster than 79 miles per hour, when it usually goes 100 miles per hour,” said Vollmer. That resulted in delays in the train’s progression.

“One thing that was bad was the tight schedule, so we’re a little tired,” said Jheon the day after his project ended.