Yoon Young Park’s work stems from the moment when “the artist who obstinately digs into
the truth” encounters “the invisible world wherein the truth dwells.” Triggered by “a gift
from her nephew,” an "episode" delivers the “Future,” Voyage of the Black Bird (2009) by
freely crossing the border between the real and the imaginary, and then generates another
episode tracing back to secret and shocking events that occurred at some point in the
“Past,” which in turn functions as the background and motive to the Future. Throughout the
course of the work's long journey, where debris from imponderably deep and wide
references are entwined and interconnected in inexplicable, surrealistic but ultimately logical
ways, the “Future Past Darkness” that Yoon Young Park herself witnessed gradually
discloses itself.

What has been constantly found in Yoon Young Park’s body of work is a unique state of
emotion mingled with compassion for and captivation with the notion of “disappearance.”
Women who are seemingly floating but disappearing on the surface of wallpaper; the
iconographical figures from traditional Oriental painting that are erased and repainted on the
oiled floor paper; a woman leaning on a staff while gazing at the flow of the river; women
who are disappearing into Pickton’s lake; and the blue pillars that are disappearing after
being momentarily seen. The artist’s eyes that have followed the narratives told by those
disappeared also emerge in the exhibition entitled Red Fish up the River. Noah’s Bright
Morning Star, once shown in the form of a text publication, now realized as an installation
work consisting of three folding screens, a single-channel video, drawings and a wall
painting. This episode unfolds into another installation work entitled “Bye, Noah, see you
tomorrow!”, betraying the deep darkness of the past in conjunction with the history of the
psychological and emotional abuses and physical/sexual violence that occurred in residential
schools, established as part of an assimilation program for Native peoples in Canada, that
has been largely swept under the carpet. These historical events, which first came to light
in the 1980s, are connected to the artist’s personal experience of visiting the Tulalip Tribe
in Seattle, from which another layer of narrative emerged. In this manner, at the moment
when a certain event conflicts with the inner being of the artist, Yoon Young Park caught
the moment of synchronicity by interweaving her own personal story with the "debris" from
other experiences. The artist’s curiosity, provoked by the tragedy of Aboriginal people a
century ago, takes her own experiences and weaves another fictional narrative beyond the
borders of the real and the imaginary around hidden historical facts and personal memories.
Elements from various fields such as film and music, the Bible and myth, scientific theories
and pseudoscientific knowledge, are deployed in a kind of "plot-making" process to form
the basis of originating the "universal principles” from which fictional narrative can transcend
time and space.

While reading Yoon Young Park’s work, however, it is not particularly crucial to find the
exact referential source from where each work is derived or to follow the entire plot from
which the story of the works is unfolding. While each individual work and the narrative of its
context is its own entity as a unique creative endeavor, what is more pivotal in her work is
to glimpse at her exquisite and ingenious ways of creating a world. Her method of creating
an original, idiosyncratic world is reminiscent of the “Glass Bead Game” by the Magister
Ludi in Castalia that Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) portrayed in his Novel Prize-winning
novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943). The Glass Bead Game is “a kind of synthesis of human
learning” in which themes such as a musical phrase or philosophical thoughts are stated or
enacted with glass beads instead of musical notes or letters. It is a spiritual composition
which “might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the actual theme of a
Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the Upanishads.”* Yoon Young Park’s body
of work, where events, people and objects that are seemingly unrelated and even conflicting
are ingeniously connected beyond borders of the varied genres of arts and science by
analogy and contrast, draws reference from these intellectual improvisations. For example,
the "debris" woven while idly playing a game with such varied elements as a historical
tragedy from the last century, a gift from her nephew, the name of a place derived from an
Aboriginal word, the binary system and Yin-Yang theory, volcanos and a bright morning star,
and Marilyn Monroe performing a song in a film clip, manage to evoke an imagined but
coherent world. Similar to the way in which in Eastern philosophy, a spiritual awakening
where real meaning is revealed while idly strolling in nature, Park divulges another other
side of a hidden world with her own glass beads, arranged in another kind of universal
language absent of denoted letters and signs.

“With time I feel that the stories that were originally one are scattered and coming around
to where it was supposed to be,” she states. Yoon Young Park’s recent attempts are read as
a gesture of revealing a whole, universal world, or the Providence itself, by merging
episodes from each exhibition. Herewith, the ambivalence toward the idea of “disappearance”
that has captivated the artist for so long is indicative of a different yet similar emotion that
has resided in different dimensions. Accordingly, it is not enough to grasp every symbol in
her work in order to penetrate Yoon Young Park’s world and confront it. Although trying to
find a toehold into a game that freely crosses all borders would likely be the only effective
way to enter the world of Yoon Young Park, a world entangled with successive, sometimes
fortuitous chances and free association of ideas and ambiguities, forever opening and closing
in upon itself.

Our days are precious but we gladly see them going
If in their place we find a thing more precious growing:
A rare, exotic plant, our gardener’s heart delighting;
A child whom we are teaching, a booklet we are writing.

*Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943), New York: Picador, 1990.

Yunkyoung Kim (Director, Mongin Art Center)