About Park’s work ; allusion
The artist’s work starts from “What is painting?” Painting includes fundamental questions about the object, light and the essence. Furthermore, the meaning of life in the eyes of the artist is related to her work. Her ontological deliberation about painting is continuous. The process of work is a process of introspecting life and it includes the meaning of life. The artist ponders about her work and life in an autonomous way. “Where do we come from and where do we go?” Park seeks the answer to that query by her work.
Park doubts about life. The artworks represent the feeling of resentment and the feeling of helplessness found through the existential retrospection of life. The artist also visualized longing and got inspirations from nature, and exposed Metamorphosis in 1996. A black spot that represents metamorphosis like a seed and plant expands into a line and into a plane. The reflective surface of graphite resembles with the reflective surface of gilt religious paintings. The artist believes that the visual effects of the illusion of these two reflective surfaces and the light itself are inside the painting. Contemplating the visual illusion made by the reflective surface is a moment of fascination. The artist interprets this fascinating world of reflected light as an allusion of life energy.
The reflection of light which the artist is focusing on preserves a sublime beauty. The golden backgrounds of Byzantine Icon or religious Renaissance paintings symbolize the eternity of paradise and the holiness of the place. Park acquired the skills of gilding by the tabernacle <Linaioli Madonna> of Fra Angelico. Gilding creates a numinous beauty through the reflection of light. The golden aura inside the reflection has a physical and psychological effect. The work using gilding’s reflection is focusing on the expansion of new space and is connected to installation art. The artist expects the viewer to enter inside the space and experience artworks that change depending on the distance, angle and lighting. Park focuses on the intermediate state between the visible and the invisible. Park captures beyond the physical phenomenon of light, which has wave-particle duality and captures the abstractness that float upon the surface of its properties. Her work is abstract and represents the infinity comprising the experience beyond the metaphorical beauty and the existence.
The deeper study about religious paintings <Bicheurobuteo, Inner Light> accompanies introspection and representation of properties. The gilding part and the tempera part of religious paintings are divided during the painting process. The limit between the two techniques, with the infinite divinity and the finite humanity, the properties of the golden leaf and the flatness of the painting, offers the artist an independent way of artistic creation. The key of Park’s work is the boundary between the property of the gold leaf and the tempera painting. The plastic arts of the artist understands the relation between the plane and the cubic world, the properties and the symbolism, the reflection and the illusion, and expands it. The series <Bicheurobuteo>, which excludes organisms from <Metamorphosis>, focuses on the painting’s plane and the reflection of light. The artist treats planarity and reflection of light as a theme. It is called 'Plane Object'. She unveils her own formative theory expressing both the planarity of the painting and the reflection of the light. The artist dismantles the planarity of the traditional painting and self-reflects in front of a blank surface. The reflected light reproduces the space of a mysterious illusion made when getting out of the surface of the object. Her work deals with properties inside painting. The gilt ‘Plane Object ’, a cuboid with four gilt sides, varies with space and light. ‘Plane Object ’ becomes a plane by receiving light, and therefore losing the properties it originally had. With a structure where support, background and the upper layer covered with paint form one material thing it creates a subtle and original space.
Park often strolls down a path in the woods after moving her workroom to Namsan-gol. Receiving the energy from pine trees and other various trees, she feels the spirits of trees as she meditates. She does not intentionally struggle for ideas, but tries to delete unconscious thoughts. Her attitude about artwork is similar to a meditative attitude. The artist and the artwork cross each other as subject and object in the work process. The artist as a subject and the artwork as an object interact together to be united together. Particularly, the gilding process is an experience where the subject and the object become one into space and time. Where the boundary between the subject of perception and the object has disappeared, stand Park’s ‘Plane Object ’. ‘Plane Object’ are the self’s metaphor created by the painting’s surface. The canvas deprived of its properties on the boundary between matter and mind becomes a new object that symbolizes the self’s metaphor. Therefore it forms one unit. ‘Plane Object ’ consisting of several units are repetitively installed on the wall.
The artwork is the projection of the self. It is like a mirror reflecting one’s own face. The viewer has to look at itself objectively from a certain distance. The artist transforms the plane into an object and objectifies it. To the artist, the meaning of the object in art is an object and stuff. She understands existing paintings as material structures with support, background and the upper layer covered with paint united together. By broadening the scope of her work, she moves beyond the canvas to a specific object, a cuboid, to make ‘Plane Objects’. She places the subject, which is the artist and the object which is the artwork in line and keep a certain distance between them. The process of objectifying herself and the object is a way to perceive that the world is one as a whole. Park’s work surpasses the gap between the artist and the object and shows a unity of the two. It is a collapse of the boundary between the subject and the object and is a meeting of them.
Light reflects existence. Park’s work implies the existence beyond substance. ‘Plane Objects ’ pursues a harmony full of life energy inside the disharmony between reality and the unreality, the matter and the esprit, the subject and the object. It proposes a world of consolation by keeping light reflection and expects an artistic world with one as a whole. The world of aura made by optical illusions faces the artist and the viewer naturally by itself.
Daesin KIM (Art and cultural critic)