Park’s Truman Show

When Truman Burbank, the main character of the Hollywood movie “Truman Show” realized that his life is merely playing a passive character role in series of documentary drama in a gigantic TV studio, it came to him as a shock and liberation at the same time. Korean artist Sangho Park presents his own Truman Show with his original methods and ways. He breaks the stereotypes and the conventional perception of the viewers with his witty and artistic works.

Park shows the Stuttgart city and the capital city of France - Paris, as Potemkin’s village, as a city in a movie set. He expresses the cities having only a façade being fake, that is built with structural scaffolds. He polishes the works with expertised, delicate colouring and advanced photo retouching skills. The viewers are then in surprise and try to find out the trick, but soon fall into amazement noticing how easily we are tricked by him.

Everybody knows the famous “ l’Arc de Triomphe” is not a plane monument, but in Park’s work, it actually does look perfectly plane. He suggests how difficult it is to harmoniously perceive “reality” and “to recognize as real.” However, his works have no particular intention for an optical illusion alone, they are in high aesthetical quality and technically completed in an outstanding style with a strong sense of expression. This is not only effective in his installation works and the retouched photographic works, but also in his video works and sculptures. Even though he has a variety of manners of representation, his theme does not disappear; his works have always been expressed within “recognition,” “point of view,” and “tension in space,” with a goal to reach a big effect especially in the analysis of three dimensions.

Purposelessly, Park leads us to part of the future in unconsciousness. Like “second life (secondlife.com)”, the cyber world that imitates our reality which is very close to make the people believe it as real, Park guides us to the future’s subconscious three dimensions and brings forward this development along with his works.

Stefan Schuler, fine arts 2219, Stuttgart