Exhibiting Paintings

Sunghui Lee (hereafter “Lee”): It was at the Phenomenological Perception exhibition held at Gallery 175 in 2006 that I saw your works for the first time. Then I saw your solo exhibition, Snaplife, at Sungkok Art Museum in 2010.

Jina Park (hereafter“Park”): Phenomenological Perception was an exhibition curated by Professor Whuiyeon Jin and Critic Shinyoung Chung, and I participated in it with the ‘Lomography’ series. I held solo shows twice before that exhibition, but I think I can say that you’ve seen my works almost from the beginning. My first solo show was in 2002 at Keumsan Gallery when it was in the Sagan-dong area. My second solo show was Leisure: Kumho Young Artist, held in 2005 at Kumho Museum of Art. The ‘Lomography’ series was exhibited there. When I present my works in a lecture format, I usually start with the Lomography series. Looking back, there are many connections between this series and my recent works. In other words, I was already addressing my current interests back then.

Lee: Did you take part in NewBudMuscleStrongRecommend, the show held in 2001 at Jeongdok Public Library, after your return to Seoul from studies in London in the UK? The exhibition title is unusual.

Park: Because the works I had created in London weren’t large, I remember bringing them myself and participating in the show. I have heard that they came up with the exhibition title by gathering exaggerated neologisms that were common online at the time. The show was planned by people including the late Yiso Bahc and the curators Young Chul Lee and Mijin Kim. I recall works by artists like Yongseok Park and Jayeon Kwon being exhibited then. I think you can compare that exhibition with Today’s Salon (2014) held at Common Center if you want to search among recent shows, in the sense that it showcased works by many young artists, combining both art school students and artists who were active in the field. The difference would be that NewBudMuscleStrongRecommend wasn’t an exhibition of paintings. It presented very few paintings. Back then, young artists mainly worked with installations, videos, and conceptual art, you know. It was a time when alternative spaces like Project Space Sarubia, Art Space Pool, and Alternative Space Loop played important roles, and people pursued new art forms, which were different from before. NewBudMuscleStrongRecommend, too, was a show planned in that context, and it was the first curated exhibition in South Korea that I participated in after I finished graduate school.

Lee: It’s also unique that the exhibition venue was Jeongdok Public Library.

Park: The plan was to showcase new art, you see.

Lee: In the following year, you participated in The Show (2002) held at Insa Art Space, right?

Park: I remember artist Dusu Choi curating the exhibition and artists like Young In Hong and Suejin Chung participating in it.

Lee: What did you feel at or about these exhibitions? And what changes happened to you after the show?

Park: I realized I belonged to a new generation [laughs]. Located in the Insa-dong area at the time, Insa Art Space was an important space that hosted many shows centering on young artists’ works.

Lee: It was from Neon Grey Terminal (2014) that I began to consider exhibitions of paintings. Sunjung Kim curated the exhibition, and I was in charge of the practicalities. Many painters came to see your solo exhibition, and because of what they told me, I began to think about exhibitions of paintings after that.

Park: Since then, you’ve curated many exhibitions of paintings, right? In particular and mainly shows of paintings by young artists.

Lee: In 2015, I curated an exhibition of works by young painters entitled Our Awesome Moments. Back then, I didn’t know how to approach paintings. Well, I’m not much different now, either. I learned from painters to read paintings. While I was preparing painting shows, I just looked hard at paintings before reading other people’s analysis of them. You once said, “Paintings are images and materials at the same time,” and, at the time in which I was not clear about how to look at paintings, I started to look at paintings while relying on that statement of yours.

Park: Do you agree with it? Actually, that’s such a facile remark.

Lee: In looking at paintings, I haven’t yet found a more helpful statement.

Park: That’s an honor. You’ve said you learned to read paintings from painters. I have heard that those who came to see Neon Grey Terminal talked a lot about the next generation’s paintings.

Lee: Yes, artists like Choong-Hyun Roh and Sungsic Moon talked about such things. They also said painters only worked in their studios and didn’t communicate their thoughts and opinions with each other so much. So I came to plan Our Awesome Moments with the idea of gathering painters. For the exhibition Twin Peaks, which I curated in 2016, I dealt with works from two periods. The first group was made up of works I’d seen in the 2000s as a student. The other group was made up of works that caught my eye 10 years later, when I was working as a curator. I wondered, “If I place them together and take a look, what differences might there be, and how might they be connected?”

Park: In my view, several painters who began their activities between the end of the 1990s and the 2000s presented works with tendencies quite different from those that came before. Because such artists weren’t so many, they have looked at and continuously witnessed changes in each anothers’ works with interest, even if not maintaining close relationships.

Lee: I wonder what the artist Yiso Bahc and the curators Young Chul Lee and Mijin Kim thought and said, when encountering your works at the ‘NewBudMuscleStrongRecommend’ exhibition.

Park: In the case of Yiso Bahc, I was able to show my works through the artist Jewyo Rhii, who was my flatmate in London. I’ve heard that Bahc said my works were funny and mentioned something like “She wants to be a painter, and what’s she doing, painting toilet paper?” I suppose he found that aspect amusing, because he, too, had somehow relaxed his attitude or let go of his strength in his works.

Lee: He had a relaxed attitude but was very serious and earnest at the same time. On the other hand, you…

Park: I let go of my strength because I really had no strength [laughs]. Though I would think something was funny and paint it, it generally wasn’t visible to others. But he, I think, was someone who realized quite well that I was telling jokes to myself. I’ve also heard that someone —who it was, I don’t exactly remember— evaluated my first solo show as, “It’s too sophisticated for a show by a young artist.” At first, I didn’t understand why it appeared to be “sophisticated.” But, later, after seeing an exhibition of young artists’ works curated by Young Chul Lee, I came to understand what that meant. Whether in terms of the contents or the visuals, many of the works were blatant and intense; with identities as the themes and revealing pain in its rawness… and my works were flat and don’t directly present the contents, you see. I suppose that comment meant it wasn’t like a young artist to not show the intention or the ideas directly. But I myself thought, “Why should all young artists have to scream out loud?”

Lee: Afterwards, you received considerable attention as an artist, being selected as a Kumho Young Artist and, several years later, being nominated for the Hermès Foundation Missulsang.

Park: As for my first solo exhibition, hardly anyone came to see it. I held that show, which was in 2002 at Keumsan Gallery, by chance and by luck. A show planned by the gallery had been suddenly canceled so that I had to put up an exhibition in a hurry in two months. Not that many people came to see Leisure: Kumho Young Artist, either. The exhibition duration was short, fewer than 10 days, and the show was sandwiched between ones of young artists who were far more well-known than me. My exhibition was preceded by one by Myungjin Song and followed by one by Jae Ho Jung. Broadly speaking, they are artists from the same generation I could be part of. I think I became active around 2008-2010. Many people remember the works I presented in 2008 at the 7th Gwangju Biennale. I suppose those works got some attention because, at the time, it wasn’t so common for paintings to be exhibited at biennales.

Lee: Weren’t the years 2007-2008 a time when the art market and art fairs expanded by leaps and bounds? People went around saying any artwork would sell once it was hung on the wall. It was a really odd atmosphere.

Park: I’ve heard that back then, the KIAF(The Korean International Art Fair) thrived, and so did all art-related projects. That was before the fever died down due to the global financial crisis. Art funds were created, too. At that time, I was in a residency program at Nanji Art Studio. Though this didn’t happen to me, there were cases where a collector visited an artist’s studio and just bought a work then and there.

Lee: Might it have been a phenomenon stemming from the introduction and establishment of Western institutions like galleries and the art market in South Korea?

Park: I’m not sure. Might there not have been some other external factors? There was such an investment boom at the time, I remember, and there was a phenomenon of investing in artworks as investment in real estate became tougher. The situation was such that, even at art schools, students would say things like “I have to graduate quickly to sell my works as soon as possible” in class. To me, it was just amazing even to be able to think that you could sell a lot of your works right after graduation. It was a time when the Chinese art market was growing by leaps and bounds. Under the influence of contemporary Chinese painting getting a lot of attention, some South Korean students painted many red faces. A documentary on Chinese art was broadcast on TV as well.

Lee: Actually, I worked on turning that 5-part documentary, Documentary Art (2007), into a book. It was a program addressing changes to the hegemony over art in the past 500 years, with a focus on the revival of cities. It dealt with Renaissance art, centering on Rome and Florence; Paris and the Impressionists; New York City and contemporary American art; London and the Young British Artists (YBAs); and Chinese art and Asian art markets. In the end, the program was about markets, and particularly the art market in China too, because money flooded in along with the open door (economic reform) policy. Come to think of it, it was a very timely program.

Park: Yes, I was teaching in universities, and remember many students watching it and being greatly influenced by it.

Lee: As the art market became active, painting once again received attention.

Park: But I think that in the market, works with peculiar ideas that used unusual techniques or materials were more popular than traditional figurative paintings or so-called “painterly paintings.”

Lee: When I was planning Twin Peaks and Allover (2018), it was hard for me to find painters in their 50s. More precisely, it was difficult to find artists who could show the discourses and currents regarding painting of that age.

Park: It’s because there was a time when South Korean contemporary art didn’t see painting as mainstream. For that reason, paintings used to be discussed only from a commercial perspective or to be accommodated only in small solo shows. In my view, though there continues to be many artists who work with paintings, people haven’t noticed. So, in fact, there’s no discourse on contemporary South Korean painting. Even now, only people who paint talk among themselves, and the situation doesn’t seem much different. I remember seeing As the Moon Waxes and Wanes, a 30th-anniversary exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) held in 2016, with interest. It was a show surveying South Korean contemporary art through works from the museum’s collection. Many paintings from the 1960s and 1970s were shown, and Minjungmisul was exhibited for the 1980s, but there were no paintings after the 1990s. Was there one painting or so? Of course, there were many fascinating works. But it was odd that there were no paintings whatsoever after Minjungmisul at the exhibition. Surely, there must have been many who have been painting over the past 30 years.

Lee: I remember that, in As the Moon Waxes and Wanes, installations, videos, and photographs took up the bulk of the works exemplifying the 1990s and 2000s.

Park: That exhibition might have specifically excluded paintings, but I wondered, “Maybe the museum doesn’t have so many paintings in its collection after the 1980s.” As for me, I was curious about what paintings MMCA might have collected in the last 30 years. Regrettably, I wasn’t able to see such works in that show. It’s hard to talk about paintings of the present, in 2019, after skipping about 30 years.

Lee: I recall those who were mentioned like Suejin Chung and Sejin Park, as important young artists in the 2000s.

Park: There must be many artists, but it seems commercial success and artistic discourse are viewed separately, just as works shown in museums and mentioned in artistic discourse and those actively sold in the art market differ from one another. This could be one typical characteristics of South Korean art today. In Western art, for example in places like Western Europe and the US, museums and the market overlap considerably, you know. In the case of South Korea, only a very small number of artists seem to belong to this overlapping sphere.

Lee: Things seem to have changed a bit nowadays. Although older generation artists seem to avoid themselves commercially represented too much, such a tendency is hardly found among artists in their 20s and 30s. Young artists don’t distinguish among biennales, criticism, and the market, because the best thing is to make a living by selling their own works.

Park: Of course, I think so, too. That’s the way it should be if you want to live as a full-time artist.

Lee: We’ve ended up drifting to the art market while talking about 2007 and 2008. In my view, the art world tried hard at the time to foster the KIAF and to discover not only commercial feasibility but also artistic talent in artists.

Park: On the other hand, I know there are many young artists who were commercially promoted back then but have disappeared since. Works by young artists who caught attention in their graduate shows because of their keen sense and uniqueness were picked up and sold. Receiving too much commercial attention prematurely, some artists couldn’t hold out for long, it seems.

Lee: Around 2010, Sungkok Art Museum held many good exhibitions. You could see important solo shows. Sungkok Art Museum is a space capable of presenting large exhibitions, after all.

Park: There was an open competition called “Sungkok Artist of Tomorrow” Award.

Lee: Who was the director of Sungkok Art Museum at the time?

Park: My exhibition was planned through an open competition while curator Sou-kyoun Lee was working, and someone else was the chief curator during the actual exhibition.

Lee: I liked the size of the exhibition spaces. Works were selected really appropriately and presented through the exhibition Snaplife, which was a good opportunity to show your artistic capability to the public.

Park: In the process of preparing for that show, my works increased in size, and the direction of my work became clear. I was fully able to deal with the physical space of an exhibition for the first time. So that show is important to me, too. Because the contents of the works themselves were scenes of preparations for an exhibition, my intention was to tie the exhibition space and my works together as one large aggregate, and I learned a lot from the experience of making that happen.

Lee: Was the exhibition created like that because of the institution’s curation?

Park: I planned that show myself. Artists were chosen through an open competition, and they created the contents of the exhibition by interpreting the given space on their own. Because it was such a large-scale show, the budget was quite insufficient. Financial support from the Hermès Foundation Missulsang exhibition, which was held in the same year, was a big help. One and J. Gallery, which I worked with, assisted in many ways too.

Lee: Now I can see that it was well-timed and the show was quite painstaking, mobilizing diverse resources. The works in the exhibition portrayed art spaces and art people, and that tallied well with the space of the museum. It was a strong show.

Park: Being given such a large physical space in itself was a good opportunity. Thanks to that, I acquired a sense of the sizes of works and exhibition spaces. Once my works increased in size for that show, it’s quite hard to reduce them again. I still try hard to create smaller works [laughs].
The next opportunity I had to actively deal with a large exhibition space was in Neon Grey Terminal, at the HITE Collection.

Lee: I’d like to talk more about shows you’ve held so far. Because whatever happens is through exhibitions, I want to discuss what we can think about through shows of paintings. Could you share good and bad things about your past exhibitions as well as shows you’d like to hold in the future?

Park: The HITE Collection, where I had a solo exhibition in 2014, was one of the best institutions I’ve worked with so far in many ways. You played your part as a curator really well. Having solo shows at museums with large spaces, such as the HITE Collection and Sungkok Art Museum are definitely memorable, I must say. During preparations, I took great care regarding the level of perfection to which the exhibition would be held as a unity. Though ‘Neon Grey Terminal’ was an important show for me, I have just as many regrets as well. After the show opened, thinking that I’d misjudged some things, I intentionally changed the direction of my following works. As far as I remember, I received a proposal for that exhibition while I was painting airports as studies and held the show less than a year later. Because the preparation time for the exhibition was insufficient, first of all, I had no thought but to increase the sheer number of works. In the process of painting them, I probably forgot some important elements so that the works ended up being excessively descriptive in my perception. Because airports are specific and unfamiliar as a subject matter, there were many tasks I had to solve. I felt I hadn’t completely absorbed, in my own way, new tasks like having large numbers of anonymous figures, painting many straight lines of architectural interiors, or depicting the grey colors of airports. Looking at my works that were hung in the exhibition, I thought that the completed works should reveal the painting process or the momentariness more and should be “airier.” It seems that I only went up to representing airports. In fact, I did as much as I could at the time, but artists are bound not to be fully satisfied with the outcome, you know. I might have wanted to do better because the museum provided considerable support. In the future, I’d like to create shows based on more prolonged preparation and support from institutions.

Lee: For me, the sizes of the works were a bit too small.

Park: I agree. Back then, I worked at home. The work space was a bit cramped, and home was such a different environment from the huge airports I was painting. The working environment influenced the size of the works and space inside the works. I think I did pretty well on dealing with the exhibition space and connecting the architectural structure of the exhibition halls and the spaces portrayed in the works. The result of collaboration with a composer was satisfying for me, as well.

Lee: I recall Hallway (2013), which was hung behind the columns in the exhibition space. The desolate, cool, and empty feeling of the work matched the place well.

Park: Hallway is a work I painted under the clear intention of hanging it right there. Though airports are functional, they have many empty spaces whose usage is unclear. Also, because my works were covered with grey, they went well with the impression given by the underground space of the HITE Collection. Artist Do Ho Suh’s work on permanent exhibition in the center of the hall also felt like a structure installed at an airport. If the subject matter of the show hadn’t been airports, that installation would have been quite hard to deal with.

Lee: Do you have plans to paint airports again in the future?

Park: I did execute one work last year. It was out of curiosity. I wondered how it’d go to paint airports again after 4 years or so. First, I realized my sense of color had changed considerably. I experimented with colors after ‘Neon Grey Terminal’. If my earlier works didn’t swerve much from using colors in a representational way, I began to apply more artificial colors after 2014.

Lee: You even changed the color of the floor from grey to a primary yellow in Yellow Floor (2016), whose backdrop is the exhibition hall of the HITE Collection.

Park: Yes, I changed my direction away from grey. I think using primary colors like red, yellow, and blue was awkward at first, but I gradually came to use them naturally. Works I’m painting right now deal fully with light of various hues.

Lee: Your works from 2019 remind me of films and TV dramas rather than photographs.

Park: I wonder which movies and dramas you’re reminded of.

Lee: For example, a Netflix drama like ‘Stranger Things’. It’s a work where you go back and forth between a space of psychokinesis and real space. Your works from 2019 especially remind me of the bizarre feeling I get from that drama.

Park: That’s interesting. That is the kind of feeling I want. I’d like to paint moments where another world overlaps with reality, should I say? I just give hints of possible stories, and viewers can use their imagination freely afterwards.

Inside and Outside Learning

Lee: I’d like to ask about your school days. How did you perceive the art world back then? How did art college influence you?

Park: I’d have to say that I barely knew anything about the art world. While in the undergraduate program, I think there was a bit of distance between me and the professors because young lecturers were mainly in charge of courses. Relationships with professors seem to change when you got to graduate school, but I’m afraid I don’t know very well because I didn’t go to graduate school in South Korea. As for painting courses in my undergraduate years, I remember taking classes taught by Yeo-hyun Kwon and Gene-uk Choi. They were teaching while being very active as young artists at the time. Though it wasn’t a painting course, I remember taking a mixed media course by Professor Dongchun Yoon with great interest. Actually, in the undergraduate program, I executed paintings only as assignments for classes and didn’t really work hard on them. Rather, I was curious about and with far more interest took some courses that were newly created in the 1990s on new media like video art, computer drawing, mixed media, and installations. In the end, I found painting burdensome. There were so many people who painted well, after all.

Lee: Back then, what was the standard of “painting well”?

Park: I don’t know what that standard was, but painting was somehow immense and ponderous. Maybe many people who’ve majored in painting might be able to empathize with this sense of burden regarding painting. The burden that, compared to what I had, painting had a long and immense history, shall we say? Before going to college, I used to like paintings from the 19th to the early 20th centuries like works of the Impressionists. But these works didn’t constitute contemporary art for us. I’d wonder, “Then is painting not contemporary art?” And when you study art history, from the early to mid-20th century, painters ambitiously practiced avant-garde art through paintings. Then I’d also wonder, “Is avant-garde art through painting possible now?” When you went to see exhibitions, they’d be filled mainly with installations. That was the situation in the 1990s. So I guess I didn’t quite know how to approach painting as an undergraduate student.

Lee: Was there any talk of Minjungmisul at school, by any chance? To my knowledge, Minjungmisul exhibitions were held into the mid-1990s.

Park: I remember learning very briefly about it while studying contemporary painting in an art history class in my senior year.

Lee: Didn’t Professor Gene-uk Choi mention it in class? Though he didn’t actively take part in Minjungmisul, he’s connected to it in many ways, after all.

Park: His classes were conducted in a very serious manner. As far as I remember, he was a dedicated teacher, and students liked the course, too. There was an experimental curriculum as well. One time, during class, we went on an excursion to the Sillim-dong area. I remember it was a reconstruction site. The task was to find subject matter and execute a painting after exploring the neighborhood. I think he tried to connect social issues and art in that way. But, in my view, students found the task difficult and felt that they failed to measure up to the professor’s expectations. Still, that task is memorable, so it must have been a special experience after all.

Lee: What were your graduate school years like?

Park: Undergraduate and graduate programs were very different in atmosphere. It could have been the nature of the graduate program. It must also have been the characteristics of the Chelsea College of Arts itself. The graduate school I went to had almost no curriculum. No one would say anything even when a student didn’t come to school. I learned a lot by being in contact with a different culture, and students learned a lot by observing one another, too. Come to think of it, that seems to be what art schools are like. You get a lot from exchange with other students, rather than from professors. Some students were really active and ambitious as well. There was a kind of a lecture once a week so that you could go listen to it if you wanted to. I remember there being a theory class and a special lecture by visiting artists every other week. Special lectures could be given by artists, curators, or gallerists. When curators or gallerists visited, students would ask many questions to get attention. To me, that activeness for survival was intriguing and something to learn in its own way.

Lee: It must have been a school that let you come in direct and immediate contact with the contemporary art scenes.

Park: Yes. The programs were structured like that, but nothing was mandatory at all. If you wanted to listen to special lectures, you could simply come. There seem to be many differences among schools. I’ve heard that, in Goldsmiths College, they make you do a lot of things. You have to read many books, too. It was 20 years ago, so things might be different now. It was a time when British art was growing quickly after the YBAs. The Tate Modern opened in 2000, and many new galleries opened, too. In particular, East London, a rough neighborhood that used to be a factory area, now had galleries and alternative spaces here and there. I don’t know very well, but a lot of money seemed to be in circulation as well. There must have been quite a bubble, too. Being in London in such an atmosphere was a learning experience, if you could call it that.

Lee: It seems to have been the time when, after the YBA generation had created such a climate in the early to mid-’90s, the UK was fostering contemporary art in order to lead it. Weren’t art fairs held there also?

Park: Maybe it’s because I was uninterested, but I don’t remember hearing about the Frieze Art Fair back then. Anyway, the atmosphere of the art world was pretty provocative. Contemporary art was treated like pop culture. I saw a lot of weird works, too.

Lee: The Turner Prize was quite the talk of the town, wasn’t it?

Park: Yes. They’d broadcast the award ceremony live on TV. That was the first time for me to see contemporary art being treated as pop culture. In my view, the British government quite strategically tried to foster contemporary art as well. Also, you have the peculiarly British tabloid gossip culture so that artists would be covered often on entertainment news, like pop stars. Charles Saatchi created a lot of news by showcasing various collections and buying up the entire collection of works presented at solo exhibitions, too.

Lee: That sort of a climate seems to have risen 5 or 6 years later in South Korea as well. For you personally, what changed the most after graduate studies in London?

Park: While in graduate school, I decided to work with paintings. I was interested more in installation art in undergraduate school. Of course, I agonized a lot about whether I could be an artist, and thought, “Anyway, if I become an artist, I’ll do painting.” I seem to have thought that there may be something I could do with painting.

Lee: What kinds of paintings did you make in London?

Park: Works before the ‘Lomography’ series weren’t large in scale, and I intended to paint as lightly as possible. I’d apply layers of paints very thinly so that paints would be runny, as if painted by someone with no strength in the hand… I’d also draw on my finished paintings, as if I were doodling. The contents consisted of miscellaneous daily life subjects. I guess I wanted to approach painting a bit from the side, so to speak. Even with the material, I mainly used acrylic paints rather than heavy oil paints. I suppose I couldn’t stand “weight” in many senses of the word. As for composition, I’d cut up the objects a lot and show parts of them. In completed works, I tried to show a hesitant attitude toward painting that lacked decisive brushwork like just dashing off one brushstroke. In fact, that was the only way I could paint. On one hand, I think I reflected in my works a sense of rebellion: “Why should painting be approached in such a heavy and difficult way?” So the subjects I painted likewise were trivial things like toilet paper.

Photography, Light, Darkness

Lee: I’d like to talk about photography and painting. One time, you mentioned that referring to photographs while creating paintings was very natural, not something stemming for a special intention. There are many artists who refer to photographs as they create paintings. At time, though, there are works that give the impression that painting is subordinate to photography or reflect critical views of photography. But, in your works, photography and painting seem to form a free relationship instead of being in conflict with each other: photography exists as it is; and painting exists as it is. In the process of planning the ‘Twin Peaks’ exhibition, I displayed Byungkoo Jeon’s works next to yours. It was because, in my view, though Byungkoo Jeon’s works, too, clearly refer to photography, they aren’t dragged along by that medium and focus on realizing the artist’s sentiment on the canvas. I put your and his works side by side as works showing sentiment by means of photography despite differences between you and him in both generation and painting style.

Park: I must admit that photography is important in my works. There are scenes that the camera captures, those that would be unnoticeable to the naked eye. There are many things you discover by chance through photography.

Lee: Figures’ awkward postures are one example, right?

Park: Yes. To me, such accidentally discovered intermediary states, where you can’t say that something specific is being done, are very important. I like states that are able to transform in nature both temporally and spatially.

Lee: How might such states be explained in other words?

Park: You can say that I paint “transit moments.” Likewise, I chose the subject matter of airports because of their nature as “transit spaces.” As you’ve mentioned, the gestures of figures I represent are indecisive and awkward because I want to paint the state between one gesture and another. Likewise, my fluid brushwork shows states where nature can be similarly transformed and which contain a possibility of change. In other words, they are states where the next step or stage exists, without being fixed or completed. I want to show the state of being in motion and being ephemeral. In this respect, photography has solved many things.

Lee: They are scenes that the naked eye doesn’t see—or, more accurately, doesn’t remember.

Park: The eye doesn’t record those moments, but there are so many such moments in photographs. Moreover, the pictures I take are not staged. As a result, photography plays a considerable role. If you like the characteristics of photography so much, it might be right to go all the way and work with that medium. However, I’m not very interested in the technology of photography itself. I’m far more interested in the styles and techniques of painting. Also, I think painting possesses far more directness and materiality than photography does. In continuing my work, this materiality is indispensable. With painting, as you are executing it, you continually contact the canvas physically, and a great number of elements arise in that process. That is, there are many elements other than the representation of images. I say the image and materiality of painting are both important in that sense. In the case of photography, the image seems far greater in my view. In this sense, my works seem to address the questions of what painterliness is and what painting is capable of doing.

Lee: Sequential scenes can be found in your very early works like Radioheads (2000) as well.

Park: I seem to like dividing time into small pieces and to look at each of them. You can depict a moment of time in a piece and then present what comes next, suggesting movement even though there actually isn’t any, which in my view, is one of the things painting can do very well. In an artist’s talk I had recently at Space CAN, I addressed this theme. Feedback from the choreographer Yanghee Lee after the talk was intriguing. She said what I dealt with in my works overlapped considerably with what she dealt with in her choreography: movements, time, space and relationships with viewers. While talking about the exhibition Snaplife during the lecture, I explained how I had intended viewers to see the show. That is, I wanted viewers to experience both the show and the works like environments and to look at spaces within paintings as if walking around in them. The choreographer seemed to identify with the way I had staged the exhibition because dance performances also have a stage and decisions about movement and angles always mindful of the audience. Also, if you think of the canvas as yet another stage, you can say that my arrangement of particular movements at particular spots on the canvas is similar to staging a performance.

Lee: Dance performances have stages and do rehearsals, so I suppose that you can find new subject matter there.

Park: In fact, I painted a dance performance rehearsal once. But the figures’ movements were very different from those in my other works. What I mainly paint are unconscious gestures or ones that haven’t been “made up.” I wondered what representing and depicting gestures consciously created by trained bodies could mean to me. Actually, painting beautiful and well-toned bodies is fun in itself, but I thought it didn’t match the nature of my works and my original intention. So I think it will be difficult for me to paint dance performances. Probably I could paint dancers resting. So, once again, I realized, “Well, I only want to paint gestures that aren’t imbued with meaning.”

Lee: Since you began to paint art spaces and your works started to get larger, I’ve noticed that you depict whole figures in such a way that they are placed deep inside spaces on the canvas.

Park: I suppose I’ve come to paint like that since I began to stress the sense of space. My works have become larger because I want to represent large, wide spaces. And I’ve come to portray entire bodies, leaving space for movement around them. As a result, you can sense the distance from the figures in my paintings. People often mention that there’s a sense of distance between the viewer and the subjects in my works.

Lee: I’d like to talk about light in your work.

Park: Light, especially artificial lighting, is a subject matter that I’ve addressed actively in recent works. But, looking back, I dealt with it as quite important in my earlier works as well.

Lee: My guess is that you’ve depicted night because of the importance of light.

Park: Yes. Of course, in figurative paintings, you can’t avoid dealing with light in one way or another. In each period, there was a particular light that I focused on. In the case of the ‘Moontan’ series, I dealt with the light from the flash of the camera. That is, it is light that doesn’t actually exist and is visible only in photographs. So you can see figures and landscape depicted in an especially flat way. Afterwards, as I came to paint night scenes around 2007 and 2008, I naturally got to work a lot with artificial lighting. For example, in a 2007 work titled The Long Evening, you can see the big, round light. Also in works depicting exhibition spaces, that I executed around 2010, an important element of white cube galleries, artificial lights shedding light on the spaces, are highlighted as important as the white walls. The subject matter of artificial lighting emitting white light recurs in my works. At People Gathered under the Lights, a solo exhibition held in 2018 at Hapjungjigu, “lighting” became the keyword for exhibited works. I wanted to insert the word “lights” into the title of the show as well, so we came up with the title according to the idea of critic Haejin Pahng, who wrote the introduction. I’ve painted fireworks in my latest works, too, so you can say I’m depicting artificial light itself. Light emitting diverse colors is the subject matter of my recent works.

Lee: It’s interesting how you portray light as lumps of color. The part where light is painted looks like yet another space. In your latest works, light creates a pretty psychic atmosphere, too. Based on this atmosphere, I guess that the future direction of your works will change.

Park: I intended that psychic atmosphere. Though I don’t reveal this blatantly in my works, there are times when I imagine rather surreal tales while working on a painting. When executing the Moontan series, I imagined the places portrayed on the canvas might not be on Earth.

Lee: What other works are like that? I should look for them carefully.

Park: It’s not all that obvious. I like the atmosphere right before things get surreal, should I say? Only to the extent of leaving a possibility of further narratives. While working alone, I imagine things like that to keep myself entertained. It’s also to imbue a very ordinary scene with a bit of tension.

Lee: Then light isn’t just simple light. It’s a space and a certain kind of energy as well.

Park: I think light, by nature, has a quality that allows people to have spiritual experiences.

Lee: As for ‘Happy New Night 03’, your work from 2019, did you paint it with shades of red in mind from the start?

Park: Yes, I thought of painting red light. With Happy New Night 05, I tried to paint green light. And, now, I’m thinking about which color to depict light with in my next work.

Lee: How about creating a very white work or an entirely black one?

Park: Ah, yes, that sounds fun.

Lee: Your works have changed in a series format according to the period. Have such changes been natural or have you had particular outside influences in each period?

Park: Because I looked for the subject matter of my works in my surroundings, it was chosen naturally in most cases. Usually after finishing a solo show, I’d intentionally change the direction of my works because I wanted to address a new subject matter. In the case of the ‘Lomography’ series, as I began, I remember thinking, “Now, I should deal with paintings from the front.” Though those works are divided into four sequences, a form not found generally, through the series, I started to ask in earnest, “What is painting, and what can I do with it?” Subject matters that interested me at the time are still with me to this day. Works since 2006 depicting nights in cities actually reflect my daily life and surroundings at the time, as I was active mainly at night. I usually painted at night, too. Those works mainly portray people having fun at night. Likewise, I mainly depicted people’s leisure activities in the Lomography series. Because I painted people at their leisure time in cities so much, someone dubbed me an artist portraying scenes of people partying. So, thinking that I might paint people working as well, I thought of people preparing for shows in art spaces. This is because scenes of people at work that were familiar to me were those in which people are preparing for art exhibitions. You can say the idea was chosen naturally from my habit of looking for subjects in my surroundings.

Lee: But, then, it was a subject matter that no one else chose.

Park: In terms of how it was to be depicted, there were many elements worth attempting such as how white walls were to be represented. On a minor level, there was also the fun of portraying people I knew. Because I painted art spaces, I was often asked whether or not criticism of art institutions was my theme. Criticism of institutions wouldn’t have been completely absent, but that wasn’t an important intention. Rather, my attitude was much more about literally painting the environments surrounding me. I thought my works served as records, though. Records of which people worked in what ways within art institutions in South Korea around 2010, records of what exhibition spaces looked like and how shows were put together. I recorded them in a way that painting could achieve. I suppose I was interested in looking at the “back stage” of things even back then.

Lee: Because those paintings depict the interior of structures surrounded by concrete walls, you can see there are very many straight lines. Here, I saw differences from photography. Though the works clearly referred to photographs, those straight lines were portrayed comfortably, as if you weren’t aware of them at all. Many photographers take great pains to make straight lines straight and get the horizontal and vertical lines and angles right. They correct straight lines diligently.

Park: That is because, in photographs, straight lines are easily distorted. I would portray straight lines as bent, as in casual snapshots, or straight if that seemed right.

Lee: Among painters who refer to photographs in their work, some depict straight lines very straight, as in corrected photographs. At times, that seems more subordinate to photography. In your case, though you paint spaces with many straight lines, you leave lines as they are even if they aren’t quite straight. That lets viewers look at your works comfortably without tension.

Park: This is a slightly different topic, but there are quite a number of painters who base their underdrawings on grids in their work processes, even though it’s not at all obvious from the finished paintings. Because it was a method I hadn’t thought of, I remember being a bit surprised at the time I learned about it. In my case, I don’t use grids on my underdrawings at all so that I end up using many crooked lines. I suppose the method of underdrawings has an effect. I tend to leave crooked lines as they are, thinking they’re natural. To some people, crooked lines with angles that don’t fit together could be uncomfortable.

Lee: After all, in fact, we can’t tell if our eyes really perceive straight lines as straight or as crooked.

Park: Because it’s natural for lines drawn with the human body to be curved, showing them as they are in paintings, which are executed by hand, is a good way of delivering physicality. Because the element of chance in the working process is important to me, not having the underdrawings too fixed is the appropriate way to amplify accidental-ness.

Criticism and Writing the History of Contemporary Painting

Lee: I’ve reread Speed and Time, which Jin-sang Yoo wrote for the 2010 Hermès Foundation exhibition, and realized that he evaluated the works both appropriately and accurately, classifying paintings according to their contents and forms. I no longer feel that your works show a sense of speed. However, especially in the Lomography series from your early years, there is speed. I agree with the formal characteristic of quick, thin, and free brushwork he mentioned. The passage, “the time represented in a painting is a fixed moment of the present, or a moment of the present that endlessly repeats itself in the viewers’ temporality,” quite sharply captures a characteristic of your works. In terms of the composition, the way you “divide the picture frame into multiple parts and then recombine them” surely are important keywords, too.

Park: In fact, painters tend to talk more about how something has been painted than about what has been painted.

Lee: This is because, from a certain moment, a painter wrestles with the supports and paints. While discussing the contents of the works, Yoo mentions the neutral nature of the places addressed by the works such as riversides, rooftops, gardens, and parks and calls them “unprecedented spaces.” “Unprecedented” means “something that has not yet happened,” and I think it can be connected also to the concept of limbo you mention in the airport series. At the end of the essay, he talks about feelings like transience, emptiness, hesitation, and anticipation, in the art world, as things that have been revealed by works created since 2007.

Park: Though they aren’t emotions that I’ve actively tried to reflect in my works, you can amply read them from my works. There is that kind of emptiness in the art world, after all… And transience is a characteristic that I always aim for in my works. That is not so much in the sense of futility but in the sense of things that will disappear soon.

Lee: Shall we talk more generally about criticism?

Park: I often get the impression that critics find criticism of paintings difficult.

Lee: Though I’m not a critic, I likewise have never found painting easy. It’s hard to look at paintings to begin with, and it requires considerable knowledge of art history. I’d like to talk about art history as well. I wish art historians would take as much interest as possible in what is happening at the moment. Some art historians prefer historical analysis, which mainly proceeds from one book to another, to actually looking at artwork. Discourse created in this way seems a bit empty to me. Criticism should focus on contemporary discourse; and art history should point this out diachronically with history, but such writings are hard to find.

Park: There are people who talk only of the present and those who talk only of the past, but few connect and look at the two together. History surely is meaningful only when it is linked to the present. It’s strange also to talk endlessly and only about what’s new at present. After all, even current things turn into history as time passes.

Lee: There is a paper that was later published as a book, entitled The Memory of Art History, written in 2004 by Professor Taehi Kang, whom I really respect as a scholar. As you can tell from the title, art history has been viewed as something belonged to the past. The paper discusses whether or not art history, which has been reorganized into discourse on visual culture across the globe, can have academic validity. After reading the paper, I thought that the discipline of art history likewise had an expiration date. But, working in the field, I’ve come to conclude that art history must stand firm. That is, diverse things must develop evenly and buttress one another. For art history to be excluded, it would be like a desk missing a leg. There has to be someone who weaves history.

Park: I agree. And all the materials are there. They just haven’t been woven together. This lack of interest in weaving things together could be one of many symptoms of modern South Korean culture. It may be a characteristic of East Asian cultures as well. Due to factors like swift change and discontinuity between generations and from traditions, people seem to talk mostly about what’s new at present. But if you talk always and only about new generations, you’ll only move on to the next generation several years later, not being able to properly find the contexts and meanings of works.

Lee: As a part of the Again, Correctly, Together, Korean Art program for reexamining South Korean art, the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS) has proceeded with a project to study how contemporary South Korean art has developed from the 1950s to the 2000s and what kinds of discourses it has shaped. Related symposia have been held regularly. This is a good example that reexamines contemporary Korean art, and these symposia are thus considerably meaningful. It’s sufficient for artists to state only ideas that they hold in their works, but art historians can read artworks by weaving them with certain currents or period circumstances that artists might not have been aware of.

Park: In recent years, I have often thought about placing artworks in both diachronic contexts and in history. Though there are many artists if you search for them, they all seem to be scattered. In the past, as a young artist, I myself, too, felt as if there were no earlier generations. In order to find artists you might refer to, in the end, you might mention famous European ones. So I remember wanting to look for earlier South Korean artists that I could connect with. Because I work in figurative painting, out of contemporary South Korean art, I tend to look at Minjungmisul, after all. From among artists in that group, I respect Joung-Ki Min. I also like works by Gene-uk Choi and Jiwon Kim. But I also wanted to look for women artists, if possible, working in painting. They surely must have existed, but I couldn’t really find them. Because painting is an old medium after all, it seems to be a genre where, until recently, male artists occupied the greatest majority of. That is people’s perception, too. I remember the artist Zuyoung Chung and, a while ago, was introduced to Wonhee Nho by the artist Leeje.

Lee: She’s an artist who held an exhibition at Art Space Pool around 2 years ago and published a monograph of her works recently, isn’t she?

Park: Yes. Recently, the artist Jeong-A Bang held a retrospective at Busan Museum of Art, which led me to remember her name again. I was also impressed by Yeo-Ran Je’s works at the Allover show at the HITE Collection. I wish some art historians or critics would introduce and weave the contexts of the works of more artists from older generations who, though unfamiliar to me, have steadfastly created works. I’m still very curious about painters who were active during my student years.

Lee: Finally, I’d like to hear about your expectations for this monograph of your works and how you feel in the process of making it.

Park: If I were to overview my works up to now in a book format, it would be easy to show people what I’ve done. Above all, I myself would like to gather and look at them. With the passage of time and the changes in my age and experiences, there have been changes in my attitude and views toward painting as well. At the same time, there also are interests that I’ve consistently maintained. These things will become clear when I gather images of my works. There will be aspects that I’ve been unaware of and others that I will newly discover. I graduated from graduate school in 2000, which means I’ve been working as an artist for two decades this year. It seems like an appropriate time to summarize my works so far. This will be of great help in thinking about the future direction of my works. I anticipate changes to my works that are unknowable even to myself now. What I seek to do in art might become clearer, too.

＊This conversation took place on July 13, 2019 in the artist’s studio.