DOOSAN Gallery Seoul is please to present Joo Yeon Park’s new work, Mirror Writing Love (2013), for the second part of her solo exhibition, Echo of Echo.

Echo in the two-part exhibition title refers to the classical mythological figure in Ovid’s love tale of Narcissus and Echo in his Metamorphoses. Park’s fascination with the limits and potential of the mediated language of Echo’s repetition of Narcissus’s last words and the metamorphic materiality of Echo’s bones, which turned to rocks, is closely related to her exploration of the inscrutable movement of languages and their possible transfiguration.

Park’s poem, “There I” (2013), presented in her studio space in conjunction with the first part of her solo exhibition in New York, is further expanded in the second part of the exhibition in Seoul. For Mirror Writing Love five individual stanzas of “There I” have been printed out on separate sheets of A4 paper, then pieces of mirror have been carefully placed at right angles to reflect and obscure the words in the stanzas. By using each stanza itself as a stage, the performative handwriting of the artist’s own in English and Korean, as well as the words directly borrowed from Joseph Addison's English translation of Ovid's narrative of Narcissus and Echo published in 1717 and Ovid's original Latin, has been incorporated with the movement of light and shadow created by the handheld light over the ‘theatre of language’. As the mirror slowly moves across the words, the kaleidoscopic self-referentiality of the words unfolds as the shifting edge of the mirror creates the ‘folds of language’ that are linguistic yet illegible. The mirrored words and imagery in the work reflect the artist’s ongoing interest in the idea of and around ‘the untranslatability of the intimate self’ (as expressed in “There I-”), which recalls both the symmetry of Echo’s repetition of Narcissus’s last words and the doubleness of Narcissus’s reflection:

in the
delirium of
drowning
the
symmetry of the Curve “the untranslatability
of the intimate self
doubles” ,

Presented as a five-part video projection in the exhibition space with geometric steel structures as a back drop, Mirror Writing Love (2013) shifts across languages of poetry, theatre, silent film, geometry, and art while exploring the artist’s fascination with the issues of plural languages as a means to mirror and reconstruct the world.

Joo Yeon Park(b.1972) currently lives in Seoul and London. Her works have been the subject of exhibitions at institutions such as National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea (Seoul, Korea, 2011), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia, 2011), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (California, USA, 2009), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas, USA, 2009), ArtSonje Center, (Seoul, Korea, 2008), Rodin Gallery, Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea 2007), Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul, Turkey, 2007), Akiyoshidai International Art Village (Japan, 2005), Festival Internationale di Rome, (Rome, Italy, 2005), Busan Biennale (Busan, Korea, 2006), Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, Korea, 2004/2008), Access Artist Run Center (Vancouver, Canada, 2003), Insa Art Space, Art Council Korea (Seoul, Korea, 2002/2008), and DOOSAN Gallery New York (New York, USA, 2013). She is a recipient of the DOOSAN Yonkang Art Award.

Courtesy of Doosan Gallery