Reviews
2003
Hyun Jung Park prefers embodying her ideas with her own maneuvering of ordinary objects to merely portraying them. She transforms natural phenomena and objects such as mountains, oceans, flowers, and rain into some kinds of patterns and symbols, with which she wants to express her idea of life and art. She also presents such abstract ideas as darkness, night, or incarnation (mostly associated with death), through various kinds of objects transformed by her own imagination.
In this way she successfully welds objects with her idea together by making them specific patterns and symbols. She said that she gets the idea of the patterns and symbols from traditional talismans and images among folks. With the process, which expresses very naturally Korean folk beliefs and sentiments, she has become an artist with her own voice and methods.
Nowadays many young artists want to adopt animation, performance, and video art instead of canvas-based painting as a means of their artistic expressions, which results in the abandonment of invaluable forms and aesthetic values. It is not easy to attain modernity with traditional materials and methods in this trend among contemporary artistic faddists and jargonists.
She adopts most of her artistic objects in nature surrounding our daily lives, but her presentations of them are never commonplace, nor singular. She is a rare case, who pursues her own modernity without giving up of tableau and with her unique interpretation of traditional forms and methods.
By Hongjoon You (Art critic, professor, Department of Art History, Myongji University)
「Reincarnation」, 210X 75.5cm, 주묵 on acrylic on Korean paper, 2003
2009
Dedication of Flowers: the Art of Hyunjung Park
Flower has multi-layered implications. It's a medium of ceremony and worship. It's full of desire and incantation. Traditionally people dedicated flowers (real or paper flowers) to the dead, and gave flowers to the living to commemorate their birthdays and triumphs. Hwarang and Wonhwa(elite youth corps) of the Shilla Dynasty wore flower-coronets, and the winners of the first prize in Gwago(old nation-wide contests) wore coronets ornamented with twigs of paper flowers. Even in the graves of the ancients, such as Neanderthal people, the vestiges of flower-dedication were found. Flower played a symbolic role in human life from immemorial times. Our ancestors found harmony, peace, and completeness in a small flower. The roundness of a flower with petals radiating in all directions but gathering around the center of the flower is an apt symbol of the universe. The circling of petals ends where it begins. To know a flower is to become enlightened in the nature of the universe. We could know why our ancestors called a flower as a "lightened." To them a flower was both a religion and a symbol. To dedicate a flower to someone was a beautiful and consecrated act. I have a memory that I was fascinated by the sad but beautiful flowers decorating a hearse in a funeral train. I like age-old folk-paintings with peonies and pillows embroidered all kinds of flowers. The flowers was an exquisite expression of desire and hope in men.
「Dedication of Flowers」 , 90 X 120cm, Ink on acrylic on Korean paper, 2009
There are lots of flowers in the new paintings of Hyunjung Park, whose works I reviewed a few years ago. Besides flowers, there are other objects in her paintings such as mountains, trees with no leaves, birds flying in the bare sky, and a man showing his back to us. All the natural objects including man, however, seem to me kind of flowers. The artist told me that she realized she was dedicating flowers to her father who passed away recently while she was cutting papers and attaching the pieces to the paper canvas. She was meditating on human life and death in general, while she was recalling her memory with her father and soothing her sorrow for the loss of him, and saying farewell to him. The act of cutting and pasting pieces of paper itself is an act of eliminating and choosing the memory of the dead. It is a kind of healing act the bereaved could do. She cuts flowers, trees, mountains, birds, and men from papers with her drawing, and composes a new world with those pieces. The objects newly taken place in her work express themselves in new voices. Her elaborate works have thus attained a new sphere.
Her work has a personal motive, while her method itself reminds me of the traditional paper work. By a shear or a knife she cut pieces of paper showing partly and suggestively her color painting and Korean-ink painting with shades and with tracks of her brushwork and attached them to the canvas. The pieces have the appearances of man, trees, birds, and some desolate landscapes. A hill with trees, man, flowers and grass appears still and lonely with background of boundless landscapes. Her works have multiple voices, for her painting or drawing is mixed with her cutting and pasting, face and/or back of papers is brushed, papers have tracks of brushes. They are paintings, collages, pieces of paper, and low reliefs made of paper, at the same time. Pieces of paper heaved a little above the flat paper canvas make delicate reliefs. Knife- or shear-cutting pieces give us a strong and definite impression, whereas brushed papers feel smooth and soft. Such tactile outlines in her works could not be made by brush-work, while each piece of paper pasted on her paper canvas retains delicate shades by her brushing with Korean ink. Her experience and understanding of our traditional art makes her to do such an elaborate work. I believe her talent could create a new tradition in the mainstream of Korean traditional art.
By Youngtaik Park (Professor of Gyeonggi University, art critic)