The
Inner Landscape, the Abstraction of Conception
Shin
Hyeyoung
I will begin my essay by
referencing Jeremy Rifkin’s publication, Beyond
Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. This book, which was written
by Rifkin in 1993, points out the many acute problems that have arisen since
humanity began consuming meat as part of it diet and emphasizes that the only
way to put an end to all problems of modern civilization is to put an end to
the meat-eating culture. Beginning with the cruel slaughtering process of
cattle, the book explains how the human perceptions on cattle changed over the
course of history and the extent of industrialization that such perception
change led in beef production, with a focus on the case of the United States. He
states that excessive industrialization of beef production is a cruel act
against animals and moreover minutely describes what kind of threats that this
may present to humanity. The threats are not simply the risk of illness that
may be caused by a meat-based diet. He makes sharp criticisms regarding how
much grains are consumed for raising cattle; how much land is necessary across
the world to cultivate such grains; how much the ecosystem is destroyed and how
the environment is threatened by this; and the extent of correlation between
beef production and consumption in wealthy countries compared with the poverty
of the Third World countries who have to meet their demands for beef production
and consumption. Even 20 years since its publication, Beyond Beef ─ a direct demonstration of the harmful consequences of
excessive industrialization carried under the name of neo-liberalism and the
problem of the global polarization of wealth through the issue of “beef” ─
still remains valid and has become a pressing issue for us in the present-era.
I began my critique of Park Yuna
with a brief synopsis of Rifkin’s book because her painting with the same
title, Beyond Beef (2010), relates to
the content of the book ─ and moreover embodies an important characteristic that
permeates her world of art. This painting ─ depicting a belly-revealing
homeless person lying down in front of the signboard of a barbecue restaurant with
illustrations of beef ribs, thin skirt, and skirt meat ─ depicts the “beyond
beef" culture of Korea. With the liberalization of beef imports, it has
now become possible to eat a single serving of beef at a cost of only 8,000
Korean won (equivalent to approximately US$8) as advertised on the signboard,
but the painting directly shows that even this price is impossible for some
people to afford. Not only that, but this painting most effectively reveals the
“marbling” pattern ─ one of the artist’s most important characteristics in her
paintings in general, in terms of form ─ as it coincides with the content of
the work. The pattern that connects the beef marbling and the homeless person’s
lump of flesh, at first glance, looks somewhat like saggy “fat” and somewhat
like surging “blood.” The composition of the work characterized by the form of human
flesh on the floor seemingly being gazed down upon by the more valuable beef
further emphasizes the theme. Such characteristics in terms of content and form
of Beyond Beef provide an important
clue to understanding the artist, Park Yuna. Based on this, let us take a
closer look at the painterly characteristics of the artist by content and form.
Firstly, in terms of the subject
matter of her work, Park begins with the places where people mostly spend time
in the city including subways, studios, offices, cafés, and Internet cafés and
the people using these places. She gradually delves deeper into subjects
revealing her critical perspective of the capitalistic system, including
Costco, the Newtown district, redevelopment sites, franchise stores, and the streets
of China. Of course, it is unlike her early work depicting neutral subject
matter that did not embody a critical perspective. The subject matters that she
mainly chooses are not simply urban spaces but spaces that feel fatigued due to
the repetitive daily lives of people. For example, the human figures that
appear in works such as Fatigue-Subway
(2008) and Fatigue-Man (2008) are
depicted as if they are going to melt down to the floor from fatigue. In the
succeeding works, the theme of expressing the marginalization and isolation of
the urban people continued into presenting the contradictions of society and
presenting the tragic reality in a more powerfully than before. In Emergency Exit (2009), which has a
similar theme to Beyond Beef, the
homeless person has fallen on the floor of Costco rather than in front of the
barbecue restaurant. Costco, a warehouse discount store in the United States,
is as explicit in demonstrating American capitalism as beef. Costco boasts
cheap prices and an unconditional return policy, but most of their merchandise is
bulk-packaged and therefore wasteful, and it is only open to people with
membership. Park closely observes Costco’s characteristic of such extreme
capitalism, depicting shelves stacked with merchandise like a spire (Building Costco, 2009). She portrays the
large-scale retailer seeking to develop and enter markets in various countries
across the world in the image of a wildcat steam locomotive of the era of
industrialization (Brand-New Colony_Train
in Costco). In addition, the series Relics
in Their Integrity (2012), which explicitly depicts the situation of
present-day China at the lead of the production and consumption of the
neo-liberalist era, features antique shops on the street selling fake relics
against the backdrop of fancy skyscrapers that have been newly constructed (or
those that are in the process of being newly constructed). The work, therefore,
symbolically depicts China’s transformation in its system ─ characterized by
the market economy system encroaching on the socialist system. In this way,
Park’s interests have consistently revealed the power of the capitalist system
that is dominating the entire world, the gap between social classes resulting
within, and the consequent contradictory reality.
Such thematic interest of the
artist has a synergistic effect together with her formal characteristics.
Several formal characteristics endow the paintings of the artist with a certain
uniqueness. The first characteristic is the pattern that is referred to as
marbling or “planaria.” This particular pattern, which has appeared from the
artist’s early works ─ filling up the surface in whole or in part ─ highlights
particular subjects and landscapes. Depending on the work, the pattern
sometimes melts down on parts of objects, partakes of liquid surging into the
air, and at other times gives the impression of a sticky animality as mucilage
connected parts of the human body like planaria feeding off dead animal tissue.
Such pattern reminds one of the idea of “liquid modernity” introduced by
Zygmunt Bauman to describe the state of unstable and fluid disorder since the
modern era and simultaneously alludes to the human desire that constantly wells
up and withers in the age of global capitalism. Moreover, it does not end up in
being a simple pattern that fills up the picture plane for form’s sake but
plays the role of expanding the overall concreteness into the potential of
abstraction. The second characteristic is related to such expansion and
abstraction of pattern. The pattern unique to the artist is not fixed in terms
of form and extends across the canvas in organic form. Moreover, it broadens its
scope, going beyond the canvas and onto the exhibition walls, like planaria
that ceaselessly regenerate even when parts of their body have been cut off.
Beginning from the end of the completed canvas, it climbs the walls and
ceiling, expanding into a temporary drawing and therefore occupying the space. In
addition, the artist has actively experimented with form, going beyond
paintings completed through traditional methods, by varying her paintings in
terms of arrangement by each exhibition and connecting them into wall paintings
of different form or taking drawings on the wall and transforming them into new
paintings on canvas. The third characteristic is the scale of the work and its
overpowering effect. When in the form of a wall painting, the work encompasses
the entire space. Not only that but most of the artist’s work maintains a
large-sized picture plane, usually 227.3 x 181.8 cm or greater, just by the
size of the canvas. Park arranges the images that she routinely collects with
her camera in a composition that fills the entire picture plane and depicts
them in great detail. She makes not only specific subjects but the rest of the
surface into patterns with mostly lines, rather than planes, and fills all-over
the work with minute detail. Therefore, most of the artist’s large-sized
paintings with surfaces that are densely packed with detail overpower the
viewers. The composition of the paintings ─ characterized by a perspective that
looks up from the bottom to the top ─ doubles the overpowering feeling.
In this way, the paintings of Park
Yuna, which have expressed the encroachment of the massive capitalist system on
unique large-scale canvases and wall paintings, continue to the present-day
upon undergoing a state of transition. This transition was carried out both in
the direction of “internalization” and “abstraction” in regard to content and
form. However, this was not a transition into a totally different theme and
form but is closer to change in perspective and method. In terms of content, it
was a transition from the somewhat macroscopic perspective on the city and
society to a more microscopic perspective based on her family and life. In
terms of form, the transition marked a change from the original method of combining
abstraction of partial pattern on to detailed conception to the method of
generalization of certain patterns and revealing a particular conception
overall. There are works that became a turning point both in terms of content
and form ─ Unfamiliar Face (2012) and
Broken Garden (2012-2013). Both
series are grounded on the artist’s memories and complicated emotions about her
mother, who had been absent during her youth. In her notes, Park writes that such
memories and emotions “refer to the ‘unknowingness’ of the ostracism of the
subject that she had never encountered for the physical time of seventeen years
and the ‘unknowingness’ of this period and the situation of subject of the
present and moreover the ultimate ‘unknowingness’ of the figure of the mother
herself, who induced all of this.” Park collectively referred to her mother’s
face that she could not remember even she tried to recall it, her mother’s
present state that is unknown because she is unable to get in touch with her,
and her mother’s emotions and situation at the time when she left home
altogether as the “unfamiliar face.” Meanwhile, “Broken Garden,” which is an
expression that the artist’s mother is said to have used to allude to her
family, is also the only part that Park remembers from her mother’s diary. The Broken Garden series is comprised of
paintings that depict the complex psychological landscape depicted from the
images that she collected by naturally recalling her youth and mother from the
traces of someone’s impoverished life that she had encountered while visiting
empty houses of redevelopment areas. In these paintings, the artist maximizes
the organic form and color of existing wall paintings, filling up the entire
plane with patterns and arranges the composition so that the form of her house
or mother’s face could be conjured up, albeit dimly, from those abstract forms.
The colors that she used ─ including red and neon-mixed purple and green ─
emphasize her mental state, demonstrating an unrealistic, monotone inner
landscape.
There was a trigger that further
objectified and intensified such landscapes of the inner mind. The artist had
visited Baengnyeongdo Island for a preliminary survey for an exhibition that
was to be held on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Korean
War armistice. Against the artist’s expectations that Baengnyeongdo Island, the
northernmost island of the West Sea, which is located closest to North Korea,
would be subject to the threat of war due to the confrontational situation
between the two Koreas, the island was extremely peaceful and the local
residents were concerned more about their livelihood that was expected to
suffer a blow from the activities of Chinese fishing boats than about war. Perhaps
this led the artist to futile realization that life is more difficult than
death. Following this experience, the artist completed Broken Sea (2013), featuring the images of Baengnyeongdo Island
including barbed-wire fences, ropes, fishing nets, forests, and roads connected
as a single organic body between the sandy beach characterized by
sedimentation. The landscape, which is entirely entangled in red, seems more
like a volcano overflowing with lava following an explosion or flesh and blood
clots showing through split skin, as opposed to a sea. It is an allusion to war
and death and moreover a metaphor for more exhaustive life. In some of her
subsequent works, the artist borrowed images taken on Baengnyeongdo Island
including the sea, buoys, ropes, and fishing nets and created ambiguous
landscapes. While specifically depicting detailed images such as the waves of
the sea or ropes, she built layers of interpretation in a metaphorical way that
it is difficult to grasp what exactly the completed form signifies.
In this way, the “abstraction of
conception” ─ transforming concrete form into the abstract ─ has been the
primary production method of the artist up until the present. Can’t be Decided, Can’t be Thrown Away
(2015), which is also one of the major works of the exhibition at the Gyeonggi
Museum of Modern Art, is a clear demonstration of this. Despite the precise
depiction of objects across the entire surface of the painting, it is difficult
to grasp the overall meaning of the forest landscape featuring rope piles, old
tree stumps, stacked empty flower pots, trash bags, and sewage tunnels.
However, the overall landscape conveys a heavy emotion without an identity that
can be affirmed, yet cannot be ignored. Though a landscape that does not exist,
the images, which mostly depict objects that are somehow familiar yet now
occupy space having lost its use in minute detail, simultaneously present a
sense of loss and that of existence. The Closing Circle
(2015), Mellow Land (2015), and Water Flows into
the Low Place (2015), presented in the exhibition, are
also in the same context. The three works, which are so similar in terms of
material and style that they could be called a tripartite painting, are all
overcast with a strange neon-hued green ─ unknown whether as to it is depicting
water or grass. On taking a closer look, it can be seen as a depiction of a trash
bag on the sea that has hardened like a fossil in the shape of waves, fabric or
vinyl covering farmland so that it does not freeze over the winter, and heaps
of earth covered with vinyl in the middle of a running valley. These
unrealistic scenes ─ unimportant whether they are of water or land ─ fill the
picture planes with numerous minutely depicted "wrinkles," revealing
the form of the subjects and creating non-abstract abstraction arousing
particular emotions. The consistent emotions coming from these landscapes with
artifacts carelessly dumped across nature create a cold and desolate feeling. In
fact, the personal hardship of the artist has been the ulterior motive behind this
series of recent works ─ that is, the death of her father, which occurred less
than two years ago. The rope piles lying on the floor, trash bags floating on
the sea, and heaps of earth covered with vinyl all allude to a recumbent
person, an imagery of her father's death. The cold, desolate feeling that was
vaguely experienced before listening to the artist’s confession seems to have
stemmed from the emotions that she had felt while staying by her father’s
deathbed. When looking at the paintings, you will be able to observe this immediately,
that is, whatever form that it may be ─ the figure curled up sideways on the
cold floor, corpse cleaned and shrouded with hemp cloth, clothes carelessly
discarded, and a figure lying down, covered with a white sheet to the very top
of the face.
For the
artist, the death of her father is both an unrealistic incident and predominant
emotion that she repeatedly ruminates over, and that inspires her work to the
present. Her works created after the death of her father convey such consistent
emotions. She confesses that “I realized there are different classes even
within death” while witnessing her father’s insignificant death. Even inside
the funeral hall of the same hospital, not only the size of the funeral parlor
but also the number of wreaths differs greatly. What would one, feeling so small in the empty funeral parlor, think when
seeing the wreaths lined to the end of the hallway? Following her father’s
death, the artist recently created two video works raising fundamental
questions on death ─ Scene, a close-up of a dying insect. Scene 1 (2014),
which is a three-minute video recording the death of a cockroach, features 1 to
30 second breathing sounds that were downloaded as free samples, edited, then
added to the video. Scene 2, a nine-minute video of the death of a fly,
combines video and sound in the same way, but combines water-related sounds. In
the two works, the insects try desperately to survive until their last breath.
Perhaps the movements of the insects are not acts of trying to survive but
rather writhings of agony, wanting to die soon. The sounds of water and
breathing, which are not clearly audible as they are mixed with static, make
the moment of death evermore tense. Through these video works, the artist
radically likens the numerous deaths that do not receive social attention to
the death of insects. The artist conveys the ideas the life is desperate for
everyone and death is a closure of the universe for everyone ─ and moreover the
death of a person close to one presents a bigger loss and despair than the
death of another person, however great he may be, and that there is no death
that is trifling and petty.
For
the artist who has concentrated on paintings up until now, video is a means to
supplement the limitations of painting and an experiment with a medium adhering
to the need to attempt other methods of expression for the same, consistent
theme. If the two above-mentioned videos are close to figurative paintings
embedded with the artist’s multi-layered objective, then Abysm (2015)
recently presented in the duo exhibition Space
Resulting from the Gap held at the Incheon Art Platform is a video that is
close to an abstract painting. This work features a variation of images that
have been distorted in terms of color and form or differ in the size of the
plane without a particular narrative through post-work and narrative of the
videos taken on a boat on the way to and in Mokpo. From the image of a
dragonfly perilously hanging against the strong wind, to the close-up of the
boat cutting across the water which has been converted to demonstrate a
stronger color contrast and turned perpendicularly so as to depict a surging
pillar of blood, overall the work displays a strong abstractness with a
continuation of images the specific situation of which are unknown, besides a
sense of “crisis.” In this way, the artist continues her formative
experimentation between the conception and abstraction not only in painting but
also in video. Moreover, just like arranging the entire picture plane by using
various subject matter from daily life in her paintings, the artist attempts
not only the compilation of images but also creation of sound of the overall
video by collecting sounds from daily life in her video works.
In this exhibition, Park will present videos and
drawings that convey similar emotions to paintings. In the case of drawings,
they are usually a preparatory stage for artists working on large-scale
paintings before moving on to painting ─ but they are also utilized as a
minimum unit to ease the artist and experiment with ideas. Park Yuna has
continuously worked on drawings on walls together with paintings on canvas, but
for this reason, she sometimes prefers small paper drawings. The “blood
paintings” of the artist are a representative example. One day, when the artist
had a paper cut and blood fell onto the paper, it came to her that she would
like to attempt drawing with blood. Therefore, she took bloodstains that fell
onto paper, dried them, and connected them with pen lines, creating unrealistic
human body forms. It is interesting how the real blood that is utilized by the
artist, who has often expressed images of blood and death in many of her works,
does not seem like typical blood but are blackish red circular dots that
connect lines and only act as a formative element.
In
this way, Park Yuna began with a single brush and has been persistently working
and continues to work. Perhaps what drives her to work so fiercely is neither
her longing for her mother nor the sudden death of her father but the
oppressive weight of life that she has fought against and the inner voices that
she must pay attention to. The numerous
life experiences and the consequent scars that have added up and become
calluses have led the artist to dwell over even a single passage of a
novel and a slice of a landscape and therefore to unveil a great many thoughts
from them. We are continuously attracted to the complex topography of the world
of art of Park Yuna, whether it may be planaria or wrinkles, because of its
capacity and depth. Auguste Rodin once said, “A true artist is one who takes close
observation of what all others have seen and dumped and brings out the hidden
value within.” Perhaps it may be easy to beautifully express what is beautiful.
However, deliberately confronting the truths of life that everyone else avoids ─
thinking that it is dirty, insignificant, or dreadful ─ and bringing out the
hidden meaning and value is definitely not easy, and this is probably the
reason why we need art.