〈Time Warp〉, Stainless steel, 17 years of hair collected by the artist, 207×198×22cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

PARK Soyoung’s works can be categorized by period, genre, and material and technique. First, there are flat works the artist created during her studies in the Berlin University of the Arts. The artist’s paintings from this period are characterized by their deconstruction and reconstruction of the narrative through deformation and manipulation, as in her work Portrait from 2005. Whereas the figure’s skin is coarse and vivacious, the brushwork for what appears to be a tied-back bun or bandana forms a single lump, with layers of different colors. The subject’ neck area, which covers the center of the surface, is nearly empty, giving the impression that this may be a work in progress. The outlines of the figure are clear yet unclearly connected. Meanwhile, the dancheong on the forehead is even more clearly featured than the figure portrayed, whereas the Buddha sculpture sits in the lower right corner as a faint silhouette. The dancheong also appears in Family, which the artist produced in 2008 based on family photographs taken at the turn of the 19th century Korea. The dancheong, Buddha sculpture, and old photos all likely allude to ‘the times gone by.’ When the artist grew homesick during her studies in Germany or when she tried to think of something that represents Korea, she probably first thought of the imagery that was most familiar to her. Meaning is not generated but is subsequently created and assembled. The artist calls this ‘a private and historical memory that runs from the past to the present’. Which is also a ‘metaphorical form of conflict and coexistence.’ Her imagination does not stop there. She combines ordinary scenes and people, sci-fi-like mechanical devices, animation characters, star-like symbology, and patterns to expand the time in her work from the actual or experienced to the distant future or cosmic time. In her works, time is not so much a linear connection of the past, present, and the future, but rather a loop like a Möbius strip or something that moves freely all over, forwards and backward. This trait is not limited to time alone. The artist’s space is also tangled, warped, or overlapping.

Installation view of ,Wood, polyvinyl acetate, 159×138×15cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

In the giant painting Sweety Home (2007), She artificially inserts various images in a top-down view of an architectural space. In the painting, a cute animated character disappears into the screen while holding an unidentifiable tool, and a woman whose face has been rubbed off to make her expression illegible is combined with a wind-up toy. This amalgam is again fused with a dog sticking out its red tongue and a striped animal, whose hind leg is transforming into a human foot wearing what appears to be ballerina shoes. The creature on the lower left is decorated with rectangular black-and-white patterns and flamboyant floral design, only to slide into the screen and disappear due to its ambiguous outlines. The vertically positioned object can be either Jacob’s Ladders or simply a staircase. Like many of her paintings from this period, this work also features a cartoon character’s big round eyes and checkerboard patterns, which serve merely as painterly rhetoric; they insist on refusing to take on any meaning or to abandon any that may be present. This may be referred to as ‘painting of painting’ or ‘form of form.’ Such combination of images through deformation and manipulation steers away from traditional painting theories such as perspective, contrast, and representation. The method correlates to the ‘plane de la composition’ (plane of the composition) that Gilles Deleuze pointed out about the work of Francis Bacon. Deleuze focused on the senses in order to address the ‘difference’ as the concept that contrasts the thoughts on sameness. Likewise, her works filled with elements of time, space, forms, and symbols call attention to the visual in order to address how eternity and extinction coexist in layered times. What is visible in the artist’s works are not meant to be believed, but rather seen. The eerie and coincidental encounters of objects, forms, and colors set a trap for us to open our sensory organs and be sucked into the surface of her works. Meanings remain open when faced with senses.

〈Floating〉, Oil on canvas, 98×73×3cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

The second category of her work entails the three-dimensional installations constructed in collage style. As the artist does in her paintings, the artist combines and presents objets unrelated to each other in this installation work to create a sort of a labyrinth. However, each objet does bear meaning to the artist or others who once owned or used the item. For example, the combination of her ex-boyfriend’s suspenders and the belt she wore for over 20 years serve as a device to summon the ‘bygone time’ to the present. The wooden hula hoop from the old lady next door in Germany, the piano lid painted with the portrait of Mozart, the fragment of a church bench, the frame detached from a round wooden table respectively evoke memories of the old lady who once spun the hula hoop around her waist, the person who performed on the piano, and whoever sat on the bench in prayer. However, such objects are liberated from their time of use through dismantlement and reassembly. For example, the exboyfriend’s suspenders sustain the duration of the breakup by connecting to the artist’s leather belt in The Love of 2010. The plastic watch that connects the suspenders to the belt perhaps represents the artist’s lingering feelings, regret, and longing as she is unable to rid away the time she spent with her former lover. While circumstantial evidence for such conjecture may be found in the presence of the same suspenders in Profile from 2018, the suspenders here are merely used to bind the plywood components with the aluminum rods supporting the sculpture. In this instance, the suspenders are used as one of the material components instead of a device that evokes emotional recollection. The object that becomes the work, is liberated from its ‘little history’ and plays a new role as a part of the still life or landscape created in the given space. While this provides an antiquated object the opportunity to deny its extinction and generate new meaning, there is always room for variability. In other words, her installation does not end with creating a single meaning but instead remains open to the pluralistic generation of meaning.

〈Ark (details 1-3)〉, Oil on canvas, 258×202cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

The artist’s recent paintings that use ‘deliberately architectural motifs’ make up the third category of her work. The timing of these paintings also coincides with that of her installation works. In these paintings comprised of irrationally arranged surrealistic architectural structures, any trace of humanity disappears. the artist splits the screen with straight and curved lines, while making implicit use of colors. One of the artist’s earlier works that reflect this new style is Buechelberg (2011). Considering how the title refers to the name of a region in Germany, the landscape likely began from her personal memory. Other works that imply the artist’s personal memory or impressions include Holiday and Eclipse. In Buechelberg, the landscape at the bottom of the work evokes nostalgia for the homeland, a lost paradise. In contrast, the middle portion segmented by the acutely straight line appears like both a mountain and a mammal’s rib cage, dominating the work over any other objects. The diagonal lines that repeatedly appear in the distance through the clouds seem to imply a mysterious light. In Holiday, the collapse of perspective provides a mesmerizing combination of oriental ink painting and western romanticist painting. In Eclipse, the center work is inhabited by a rectangular frame containing a round hole, which is perhaps either a camera lens or a black hole. The landscape around the mystery hole is evocative of the surrealist landscapes of Ernst or Dali. Whereas such works consistently evoke images (though this may only be a personal perception derived from my habit or bias as a professional art theorist), memories, recollections, and nostalgia, the screen in Warrior (2015) is comprised solely of a heavy-colored structure, void of even a glimpse of human save for the reflection in the round lens.

〈I and Me and the Moon〉, Liquid chrome maker, spray paint, oil on canvas, 146×134cm, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

In Agora (2014), the illogical architectural structure evokes images of models crafted by cutting up paper. Unfeasible in real-life construction, this structure bears a rather neutral color. Time and space have been rearranged, placing the space of Agora on the edge along the boundaries of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional. A special feature of works like these is the use of special chemicals mixed in with the paint to give a metallic glow under lighting. Sometimes she uses chrome sprays for this effect; therefore, the tragic mood evoked by the dark and gloomy coloration is sometimes mitigated or deterred by the materiality of the paint. What sort of imagination could such architectural yet compositional scenes in her works evoke in the audience of her work? Will her threedimensional rendering of bacteria evoke the sobering landscape of a disastrous future, when we will come to realize the futility of it all upon the destruction of civilization? I could stubbornly insist that the chilling sight in Agora represents her longing admiration for alost paradise, but such analysis would not sufficiently unveil the consciousness that runs across her works. Perhaps the works are not about the continuation of her memories; rather, the artist may be expressing the time beyond existence and the repetition of such time’s conception, extinction, and overlapping by breaking down and establishing the real yet fictional forms. The stacked or laid out images and forms disrupt our line of sight, denying any rational norms. The juxtaposition of objects and images in her works demands us to surrender our ‘customary way of viewing.’ When we let go of our attempts to find meaning via representation and association, singular meanings disintegrate and make way for a greater variety of meanings that begin to stab away at our retinas. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to label such barrage as ‘feelings’ than ‘meaning.’ To see means to feel. Her works make us realize that we can be set free from the fetters of onedimensional interpretation by ‘feeling’ existence and time and ‘feeling’ the paintings that have transcended existence and time.

※ This content was first published in 『2019 Incheon Art Platform Residency Program Cataloge』, and re-published here with the consent of Incheon Art Platform

Choi Tae Man

Choi Tae Man was born in 1962. He received his Ph.D. in cultural studies at Dongguk University upon
completing his undergraduate and graduate studies at Seoul Institute of the Arts. He is the author of Studies on Modern Korean Sculpture History among other books, as well as theses including “From Hiroshima to Fukushima: Nuclear and Artist Response in Japan” Currently works at the Department of Fine Arts in Kookmin University.