Kukje Gallery is pleased to present BCGKMRY, MeeNa Park's first solo exhibition at the Gallery. This exhibition, on view March 3 through April 4, 2010, brings together Park's most recent paintings from her BK and Dingbat series in addition to an installation of 200 drawings that span over a decade of the artists' oeuvre.
MeeNa Park's practice is research and process-based, constantly questioning not only what is being painted but the methodologies and philosophies adopted in her work. Well-known for works created in series such as Color Collecting, Scream, or Dingbat paintings, she is interested in exploring and exploiting the predetermined structures such as 'ready-made' paint colors available in the market or symbols hidden in dingbat fonts which she carefully constructs onto the canvas, allowing a meta or
local narrative interpretation of the works.
Things are not always what they seem in Park's work. The exhibition's title, BCGKMRY is actually an alphabetical anagram of colors CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) and RGB (red, green, black).
Once the title's meaning is revealed, it further unveils the themes central to Park's work: control and manipulation of pre-existing symbols and codes, pre-fixed standards and formulas. Moreover, these are the colors that MeeNa Park has chosen to focus on throughout the exhibition, as seen in her BK paintings, which are both homage and challenge to the history of monochrome painting by layering 11 different sized circles on the canvas using the colors yellow, red, blue and green until the colors become black, or BK.
Park's unconventional working process and inventive approach to painting is shared in her “dingbat paintings” which began in 2007. The paintings are shaped, patterned and drawn in candy-bright colors or glittery paints, transferring dingbat letters and numbers into images that bear any multiple of meanings, depending on the viewer. She applies her own individual algorithms to create her paintings, but she is already working within fixed systems of corresponding symbols and images. She is consistently challenging the way a painting can be read or the way in which language and text is communicated through image.
The drawings on the upper floor employ materials that take us back to our childhood - marker pens, stickers, and coloring pencils on children's activity books. Park's free interpretation and invention, transformation and twisting of given rules or guidelines reveal her wit and humor, her artistic process of self-selecting and organizing.
MeeNa Park has exhibited widely in Korea and abroad. Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Koreart Center in Busan (2009), group exhibitions at Centro Cultural Montehermoso in Spain (2010), Marugame Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan (2009) and Atelier Hermès in Seoul (2009). She has participated in the artist residency at Tokyo Wonder Site and her works are collected by public and private institutions such as Daelim Contemporary Art Museum and Ilmim Museum of Art. This is the 9th solo exhibition held by the artist, the third exhibition at Kukje Gallery following a three-man exhibition in 2004 and two-man exhibition in 2008.
