Park Mi-Kyoung’s painting looks like a nightscape. Her painting seems somewhat unrealistic and resembles landscape, but is not a representation of nature. Park’s recent works are dominated by black monochrome whereas her juvenilia verged on a carnival of colors. According to the artist color disappeared from her painting and black - dark shadows and black stains, filled her palette after she was in a car accident and long-term hospitalization. Restrictions on her body imposed by the accident enabled her to indulge in and wander about the world of reverie: this was perhaps an inevitable demand on her spirit within her physical limits, and struggle to overcome the situation which she could not paint. From now on, let’s enter the oneiric world of her painting. 

In Park Mi-Kyoung’s painting process is as important as the result. At the moment we first meet her painting we may be overwhelmed by the surrealistic scenes with gloomy massiveness. Looking closer, it is possible to realize the seemingly aggressive black scene is a bundle of short lines showing obsessive movement. Has her painting - completed with countless short brushstrokes - to be called abstraction or consequently landscape painting, disregarding all these processes? The artist has not defined her painting in this regard. What elementally she pursues and underscores is a process of form generated by brushwork organically meeting another form. However, it is also said her painting is not like a representation of nature but is reminiscent of some image of a landscape. Irrelevant to her intent, her scenes look like a surrealistic landscape in a fantasy film, and are interpreted in the frame of viewer perception. It seems Park does not put any significance on such viewer interpretation. The artist does not heed something grand such as artistic announcements on the formal frame of painting. As is known, modernist abstract painting often came under attack from artistic attitudes after modernism and study by theoreticians. The relation of avant-garde art with purity championed by Clemente Greenberg had to endure such concentrated fire. 

W.J.T. Mitchell poses a question on abstract art today. He comments on Gerhardt Richter as a typical painter, asking if any critical abstract painting is possible today. This question is associated with discussions on what relations a critical attitude forms concretely with a work process. This question recalling a Marxist’s painting in a sense means that critical abstract art can be justified as a painting process can be deleted, and the name of a painter may be erased since Richter paints his big pictures not with an artist’s brush but with a decorator’s brush.  Interesting is Richter himself simply maintains that a brush is a brush, replying to art historian Benjamin Bucholoh’s interpretation that “his art is not out to destroy anything or produce a break with the past.” 

It may be a dispensable, superfluous interpretation to define Park Mi-Kyoung’s painting in any genre or style. As in Richter’s work, any effort to excavate another import, including previous meaning, symbolism, and value established in the past, as a benefit in return may be reckless defiance. By focusing on modern abstract painting, we become aware that abstraction at the time did not allow subjective interpretation and viewer any involvement per se, thus translating any refusal of absolute ideas and narratives as non-political sublimity. 

On the contrary, art of the same age may draw-out all existing things, all images and styles into the work’s subject matter, themes, and modes. Nevertheless, abstract painting needs not particularly pursue purity: this is why from now on we can paint, view, and possess even filthy abstract painting. According to Mitchell, “Abstract painting existed earlier than modernism and capitalism, and will survive longer than museums, curators, critics, and art dealers. Is any political participation possible for abstraction? Maybe - but, it may be possible if it is not explicitly controversial agitative, propagandistic politics but politics of intimacy that opens new conversations through a close friendship with artists, objects, and viewers, moving beyond the boundary between the public and private.”...

...Her painting is made up of intermittent lines and repetitive actions as if being conducted in a shamanistic ritual. As mentioned in the beginning, the world Park envisaged in the state of her body paralysis caused by a traffic accident bears resemblance with an unrealistic place and the image that looks like nature appearing when a line meets another line. Her work floating somewhere between abstraction and figuration seems to be her practice of “painting” as a way to stay alive. If we come close to an unrealistic scene that appears realistic, we can realize all is illusion, as if in a fantasy film. As such, we come close to Park’s painting at the moment we realize an abstract scene is created through an overlap of a few lines or brush strokes. My wish is to witness some scenes filled with her fantasies in a panoramic space at her following exhibitions.
- Jung Hyun (Art Critic)