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Today’s YunJu Park’s works, founded upon the methodologies of architectural design, 3D modeling, animation, and virtual reality (VR), depict vast spaces that are hard to come across in real life as their background. Well-tuned music is another element that allows for time to pass through the spaces. Though we can only appreciate them visually, Park’s wonderous places make us want to immerse ourselves in them if only for a short while—that is, if they really exist. The spaces are also expanded forms of a public sphere. For terrestrial beings who live on their feet, space (and time) is a scarce resource of utmost value—one that Park enjoys the luxury of freely wielding. A utopian idea is inherent in the act of designing something; it is not a coincidence that architectural manifestos in modern literary history have always been loaded with idealism. Whether religious or not, maybe it is natural that we, as nature-derived beings, largely believe that the world was built upon good intentions. But the concept of utopia also posits a counter-reality. Hence, virtual reality can never completely shake its gloomy counterpart.

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The Earth wasn’t such a cramped place to begin with, but unlike the evolution of natural habitats, the development of civilizations was localized. In the era of large-scale pandemics, can contemporary people who have developed through localization accept directives to avoid enclosed spaces, crowds, and close contact? The other worlds Park has constructed in VR, at least in terms of their images, seem distant from the non-contact reality we must currently bear. VR, originally a technology created for military purposes, moves our exploratory gaze in all directions, presenting us with new sights one moment after another. Frequently introduced in Park’s VR works are open panoramic views, spacious interiors that could easily accommodate just about anything with no hint of regular use, and people, seated sparsely apart, enjoying their daily lives without disruption. Virtual realities fully provide everything that reality lacks, and all real-life struggles derive from the very attempt to establish and defend a place of one’s own. Meanwhile, the virtual world indirectly satisfies not only our desire for space but also our material desires.

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Non Blue Sculpture, 2019, architecture modeling, 3D motion graphic, 13min 53sec. Courtesy of the artist

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Park arranged the objects splayed around in the work Non-Blue Sculpture based on the Google analytics report “The Most Sought-After Interior Items” (2020). When we think about the products we buy and never use, their role as purchased products ends the moment their packaging is removed. The desire to purchase is endlessly encouraged as capitalism’s survival depends on this type of surplus consumption. If possession is a state of mind, then virtual possession is valid. We cannot buy everything we want, and even if we could, we couldn’t possibly accommodate them all in our real-life living spaces. Park practices “art as unrepressed wish-fulfillment” (Sigmund Freud). In the artist’s works, everything from warm sunlight, fresh air, and gentle breezes to rare natural phenomena such as auroras reminiscent of the hem of an angel’s robe can be placed anywhere she sees fit. Nature is optimized to meet the needs of the user. Whether it be the desert, the sea, or a void, the space transforms into an alternative living realm through a manufactured device.

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The tetragonal images of the grasslands and the sea are cut-out landscapes that are borderless in real life, according to the intention of the artist. And in the center of these scenes, there is an architectural setting comprised of artificial structures that resemble a spaceship. The setting is extremely versatile, not fixed. It becomes a platform where every desire is met, a point of departure to travel to and return from the nature it is surrounded by. Whereas Park’s previous video works capturing the events of the real world gravitated toward life’s hardships and destructive endings, her virtual worlds are literally “alternative.” While gravity usually operates downwards, the virtual world weaves a multidirectional network of gravity-like forces. The artist, who has joined MMCA Residency Goyang for the 14th time due to the time-oriented nature of her works, is a nomad in a contemporary sense. To Park, who wanders around the globe in short journeys without long-term visions for housing, any object is a burden. She does not have the luxury to possess any personal items other than bare necessities for her work. The array of objects that fill up the houses of the bourgeoisie who frequently perform “conspicuous consumption” as described by sociologist Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class are simply foreign to a nomad on the road.

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As an alternative “modern nomadic item” (Jacques Attali), the artist utilizes a digital media device that allows her to unfold her works anywhere and anytime. The desire for possession, fundamentally suppressed by Park’s choice to live as an artist, thus presents itself as a destructive instinct. Painfully, works produced for exhibitions by contemporary artists are at the top of the list of things that are discarded post-exhibition. Park’s works often feature other works of art—not only hers but those of her fellow artists. Scenes in which countless talented artists’ products of effort are destroyed remind viewers of a potlatch, a festival-like form of communication achieved through lavish destruction. It’s a type of symbolic exchange that leaves behind nothing but an experience of intense communication. Anthropology has documented these destructive events, often held out of fear that possession would evolve into domination. Very few of humankind’s creations are ornately enshrined in museums, and coincidence has played a big role in the survival of these artifacts through the test of time. On the other hand, there is no such thing as coincidence in a virtual world where every existence is designed.

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Cone and Wind, 2021, Architectural motion graphic, 3D animation, 4min 22sec. Courtesy of the artist

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Park’s media-related techniques are mainly self-taught. Her works are usually stored as digital files and uploaded on public virtual platforms such as YouTube. The sources, each an artwork in and of itself, can be unfolded in multiple contexts, and not only the themes but also the software programs Park uses can be shared. The architectural structure of the work Cone and Wind, showcased at the Gwangju Design Biennale, was designed by Park herself, but the complex textures of the marble that forms the interior and the cloudy sky were downloaded and pulled from model files. The use of open sources, in a sense, equips the artist with the means to build structures as grand as a pyramid by herself. The eccentric objects in Orange to Blue_The Old Man and the Sea, a work screened as part of Seoul City’s Media Canvas project, were modified versions of other artists’ works. The objects, once destined to be discarded at the end of their respective exhibitions, are newly arranged in this work and endowed with movement. As opposed to the destructive nature of her analog works, the artist grants the state of reincarnation beyond reproduction to her works and those of her colleagues in this piece.

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In Red to Grey_Architectural Narrative about the Object on Fire, Park uses animals killed in wildfires as a motif to compare the afterlife to a digitalized virtual world, allowing the destruction that takes place offline to come across as more direct. Bogenraum Episode is a video work in which she finds objects left behind at historic sites, brings them indoors, and smashes them by way of throwing; the artist describes this work as a “a funeral of things.” This act of destruction as both a game and demonstration of resistance is dramatic because it takes place in a clean and antique interior space. In the work Black to Blue, objects thrown from a prison camp—a place symbolic of violence—draw sublime trajectories in the sky. Going_Gone contains a scene in which the works of an exhibition’s participating artists are dropped from the second floor of a famous theatre in Berlin (with the artists’ permission). The gravity of life often turns works retired from exhibition into garbage, and these works, each a boiled-down object of passion, increase in entropy as they disappear into the void.

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There is a difference between destroying an artwork and destroying a mere object—an artwork is ultimately an artist’s alter ego. Park’s skepticism toward the act of repeated creation and destruction motivated her to turn her eyes toward VR-based work. For her, VR presented both an escape and a breakthrough. The same is true for other ordinary people. As attested by the artist’s recent devotion to the concept of the metaverse (a portmanteau of “meta” and “universe”), VR has expanded past the scale of reality to encompass a whole universe. The physical crisis faced by real spaces due to the global pandemic rapidly accelerated this characteristic. Park, who experienced working from home during her time in Germany, realized that work methods previously thought to be impossible are, in fact, possible. Destruction in her earlier works was, to an extent, forced in that she had lived a life of “drift” (Guy Debord) as she worked across different countries, which granted her a status almost like that of a refugee. Centered only by her work, she immerses herself in it more and more. This has been the fate of modern artists since the Romantic era. Life to these artists, as one poet put it, is something “lived by someone else.”

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Watermelon Weight, 2016, single channel video 6min 20sec, installation performance, Dresden Kunsthaus. Courtesy of the artist.

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There appear in the video Watermelon Weight, shot with reality as its backdrop, several artworks that seem to have stemmed from bitter and trying experiences. The work introduces a woman with a heavy wheeled suitcase on a stairway as people pass by in light, casual attire. The scene in which the woman attempts to climb up the stairs with the huge, timeworn suitcase with loose locks and ends up spilling all of her personal belongings in a public space is almost as upsetting as the similar suitcase scene at the beginning of the film Bagdad Cafe. There is a phrase that goes, “Freedom is achieved by emptying,” but emptying as an event caused not by subjective will but by the workings of gravity is violent. The work 15h_Under the Shadow stemmed from the fact that “in May 2017, refugees poured all the way into the corners of small towns in Germany.” People who fail to pay rent on time are treated no differently from refugees. In this work, the shade of a tree in a park becomes a temporary home with shabby household items that need to be rearranged constantly as the angle of the shadow shifts over 15 hours. Are the family on a leisurely stroll or the hiking man to the side of the scene stable, legal beings within the boundary of the ruling order? In other words, are they official residents?

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Pink to Brown, 2015, single channel video 1min 50sec, installation performance. Courtesy of the artist

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The captions that accompanies the images of objects being indiscriminately broken in Pink to Brown narrate the story of an abused woman. Though the story is roughly pieced together over several scenes and has an ambiguous ending, the images of destruction in Park’s works aren’t destruction for destruction’s sake. Rather, they are an element as necessary as gravity, derived from her life as an artist. The captions in these works also embody a sense of desperation. Explosive anger and gestures of protest against the environment the character is placed in are contained within the text. Though the objects are self-produced works, she cannot continue to be placed in a situation where either they go or she is threatened. However, the basic method by which Park’s subjects transform or move is sustained regardless of whether the work is analog or digital. The only difference is that in reality, the subjects are affected by real gravity and violence, while in VR, they advance, swimming across a smooth space across vast spatiotemporal coordinates as they transform. The blue sky and the clouds in the works insinuate that the setting still might be Earth.

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The narratives presented in the captions of the analog works are more explanatory than the artist’s digital works. Each reality holds a different share of contingency and necessity, whereas in VR, there is little room or opportunity to intervene. In which realm are we more likely to feel the “atmosphere of freedom?” The harsh reality physically experienced by the artist in her nomadic life has led her to prefer a method of work with fewer elements to hinder the visualization of her imagination. This doesn’t mean that the method shortens the time Park spends on media work. Besides, works far removed from popular demand aren’t exempt from their fate just because they are virtual. The views on Park’s work on YouTube from a few years ago are incomparably lower than some hundred thousand views on a funny video I just watched. But as digital art, protected by copyright and distributable through Bitcoin, the work is open to future possibilities. As virtual reality gradually becomes reality, the choices Park has naturally made throughout her course of work will bloom fully one day.

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※ This content was first published in 『2021 MMCA Goyang Residency Program Catalogue』, and re-published here with the consent of MMCA Goyang.