The non-Organic Organism
People, animals, and nature richly populate Munhee Park’s works in an altered state; they dwell veiled manifold, like puzzles. Park refuses to neither surrender the slight clues nor transparently release their identity. Instead of recognizing the object as “being such and such,” and claiming virtual ownership immediately upon casting eyes upon the object, the viewer is encouraged to infer reasoning and ask “what could this be?” This indirect, circumnavigating detour of a method is Park’s underlying theme of enquiry into living organisms. Strange organisms that appear to be a conglomeration of several objects cannot be grasped intuitively as a singular object, but viewed as a combined illustration of multiple relationships. Even works created from a single substance gives the impression of eclecticism, and the “cover,” found on many of his works create discord between the interior and the exterior.

Although Park’s works appear to consider organisms as the object, they do not feel naturally occurring as life is, but rather contrived, beckoning the visitor to participate in an epistemic game proposed by his reconstruction. The scope of the term relationship covers the exchange between heterogenic(dissimilar) aspects that compose the object(homogenic), and also between the agent and the object. In this context, the artist’s works deal with organisms without being organic themselves. Park’s processes focus on the devices that infer an absence or transformation of the object in question. The devices are not indulgences to the unsolvable enigma, but a beckoning to exploration, where contradictions and paradoxes are commonplace. Park’s art is oriented on organisms, and sometimes even take the form of an organism with free will. In his work, life is not a self-evident place of departure, but an unknown destination to be sought. An object may be understood in ways as diverse as the means through which it can be expressed. Unanswerable abstractive questions like those revolving around the origin and purpose of life are not found in Park’s works. Suggested instead are realistic conditions necessary to be recognized as life.

The obsessive idea that art must resonate with verity may often lead to castration of art’s virily savage nature. Representationalism is a prime example of collusion between idealism and art. However, following the era of minimalism, modern art has drawn boundaries through body and object in ideology and art, rejecting this ideological method. His work is not of a transparent structure based on intuitive assumption that specifies a rational relationship between a center and its surroundings, but an obscure object that requires reiterative interpretation across multiple occasions. It is not the synchronic lucidity but the aggregation of experience in the course of time, in other words, the process. As organisms themselves are results of long aggregated processes, temporarily is an indispensable dimension. Temporality adds uncertainty(variables) in contrast to the clear-cut stroke of spatiality. The veils in Park’s works expand the tangent between the object and the agent, vivifying the relationship with the object and consequentially forming a space of amusement.

In Park’s art, organisms are not mere material, as the device of his work follows the processes of life. The way his organisms are displayed in his works show nodal points or a sort of intersection, which are open ended forgoing conclusion. The device emphasizes process, not status. It shifts and alters silhouette and lines, deviating and distancing disallowing the visitor’s return to a single reality. Meaning transpires not from perfect agreement between agent and object, but through the ambiguous space between. Park’s paradoxical figure of speech selects not a single direction, but gives acquiesce to both directions The surfaces roused in his works overturn the model of identity that manifest under expressions such as “highest teleonomy”, “fundamental existence”, and even “historical significance”. The flexible nature of modern philosophy nears that of art as it criticizes speculative philosophy rooted in the concept of identity. Transgressing representational thought, together with modern philosophy and science, modern art restores the world as savage beings (Merleau-Ponty), and will prove an effective methodology to the production of new meaning.
- Lee, Sun Young (art critic) 

*image (left)
© Munhee Park
courtesy of the artist and SongEun ArtCube