Oriental VisArt is pleased to announce « Neon Plants, Night Lights and Travel to the Galaxy », a solo exhibition of works by Korean Artists Hyungji Park for her first solo exhibition in Switzerland.
Splashed, splattered, sprayed, spread, swept. Blotted, dripped, layered, mixed, pared back, rubbed. For Hyungji Park the physicality of paint is as important as it is a visual medium. The Artist’s interpretation of her chosen subject matter through the manipulation and application of paint is paramount.
Park takes her imagery from everyday life – drawing visual references from contemporary culture and media, the internet, art history, magazines, advertisements, and conventional motifs found in comics, graphic design and old wood cut prints. Each source is then re-appropriated through painting techniques to transform the original source into a new realisation – one that is rich in fantasy and has multiple interpretations. The Artist claims to be in constant search for ways to create new and playful dialogues between the material conventions of painting and the abundance of imagery she finds around her.
In « Neon Plants, Night Lights and Travel to the Galaxy » the artist shows recent works and those from her previous series Strange Scenery. Park creates fictitious scenes by combining collected visual references that are then dissected and recreated to form new abstracted landscapes and imagery. In her earlier works, the artist details sections with acute precision, carefully building up layers of oil paint, and then dripping watery thin consistency of medium sporadically over the works so that ultimately the result is that the viewer’s eye is drawn away from the apparent subject matter to the surface of the work and hence the structure of the painting.
More recent works are influenced by visual references taken from window displays, illuminations, objects and design. The works show evidence of a more broad experimentation with technique - paring back surfaces and detail, scraping off paint or spraying and splattering medium in order to conjure effect and experience. Park’s paintings could be said to be revelations of her mind’s processing of modern society’s visual overload of information, and her technique - her way of digesting, sorting, reflecting upon and understanding. The artworks become the connecting tissue for the thoughts and views of the artist.
Park appears interested less in the finished work than in the ‘systems’. Her works are not so much the culmination of a concept, as the product of what is unseen – her thoughts and her actions. This series denotes her advance in her practice, and her desire to have a complete experience with painting - one that involves seeing, thinking and doing.
Park earned a Bachelor of Fine ArtsArts Degrees Hongik University of Seoul, Korea in 2001, followed by her Masters in 2006 at the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. She went on to complete an additional Masters of Fine Art at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London in 2008. Park currently lives and works in London.
Sascha Gianella
May, 2011
