When I first encountered Jina Park’s Night Tree (2008) at her 2021 solo exhibition, I stood staring at the painting, pondering it for a long time. What is it depicting? Is it really a representation of something that exists in the world? Or is it trying to express something imaginary? First of all, it seems likely that the title “Night Tree” should be taken at face value. The artist must have seen and painted this tree, somewhere on Earth, at a specific time during the night; the “painting of a night tree” must be of a real tree that exists, and that reflects the particular location and time of the artist’s encounter.

But standing before it I could not help but ask, is this painting of a “night tree” meant to represent an actual tree at night? The floating lines and planes against the black canvas might suggest the shape of a tree with abstracted leaves and branches, but it is hard to determine what particular type of tree is being referenced. With the boldly simplified background, it is also difficult to determine the spatial orientation and where the tree is located. Rather, seen from a distance, the painting resembles more an intense mass of paint in dynamic motion, somewhere between green and black, changing in chroma and brightness. Indeed, the title “Night Tree” may have been assigned only arbitrarily by the artist. Or, perhaps, this “Night Tree” is a real tree (one that the artist witnessed at some point) but whose image diminished to a mass of paint as her memory faded away during the process of painting. In this case, the “Night Tree” becomes something that exists, yet does not exist. Pondering the work, these observations beg the question, what is it that this painting truly represents?

In his authoritative Art and Illusion, art historian Ernst H. Gombrich identified “seeing” as equal to “interpreting.” According to Gombrich, the act of seeing is directed by a mental set that perceives and interprets through a process of adjustment, guided by psychological attention.¹ At the core of what a painting strives to achieve, regardless of whether an actual object is depicted in the composition, there lies a way of representation that elicits the artist’s expression of emotion and desire, or the desire of the viewer who beholds the painting. Connecting the image depicted with the psychological state of the viewer, Gombrich provides the basis for a psychoanalytic and sociocultural context for understanding how paintings are made and seen. For him, the issue of ”how” an artist paints moves beyond his/her own tastes and relates to the views and perceptions of the time and society to which he/she belongs, as well as the influences from the icons and styles cultivated by past traditions. Thus, the process of making a painting from one’s accumulated impressions in the mind and potential possibilities of images is essentially a process of recognizing and revealing the past and the present of the world that the artist inhabits. ²

It is within this context that Park’s paintings can be understood as originating from everyday life, incorporating her surroundings as subjects. From the early stages of her career, Park took photographs of everyday scenes, then made paintings from the reconstructed and composite images based on those photographs. She started using film cameras and Lomo action sampler camera while in graduate school in the early 2000s, moved on to instant cameras and digital cameras, then to the smartphone cameras that she mainly uses now, integrating the rapidly developing technology into her painting process as she produced and consumed photographic images. However, Park did not adopt new photographic technology in order to produce more perfect outcome. Rather, she utilizes photography strictly as a means to an end, selecting her camera and printing methods based on their convenience and speed at each stage. For Park, photography functions as a tool to perceive the subjects of her paintings and to continuously capture the moment of witnessing. She employs the camera to act as the painter’s eyes, taking advantage of one of the biggest merits of photography—the ability to capture an image instantaneously. In order to compensate for the possible errors or flaws caused by this instantaneity, the artist takes many continuous shots and references them collectively.

Park’s use of photography can be explained by its speed and likeness—two different yet closely related characteristics of the medium. Traditionally, since the invention of photography, painters have long utilized its ability to capture live moments with likeness. Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot famously borrowed the composition and framing used in contemporary street photography when sketching urban landscapes, and Edgar Degas actively utilized photographic methods in painting portraits.³ A Russian revolutionist, Alexander Herzen, in a long editorial on Giuseppe Garibaldi’s 1864 visit to London, praised photography’s excellent mimicry, stating that “I do not intend to enter into competition with them, but simply want to give a few of the little pictures I have taken with my camera from the modest corner from which I look on. In them, as is always the case in photographs, much that is accidental is seized and retained: awkward draperies, awkward poses, overprominent details, with the lines of the events left untouched and the lines of faces unsoftened.”⁴ As described by Herzen, the strength of photography lies in its ability to “seize,” “retain,” and display a moment in its unaltered state. As the closest facsimile of what the human eyes perceive, photography has functioned for over two hundred years as an excellent tool for “rapidly reproducing” reality. ⁵

However, in Park’s creative process, photography’s ability to instantly mimic a moment can become a weakness when translated into paint. Unlike a film, it is only a fragment of the likeness that photography can capture. To represent in painting the totality of an event in reality where events unfold continuously, more than a single likeness is needed. Thus, the artist has been conducting painterly experiments by taking continuous multiple frame photographs. In her Lomography series from 2004 to 2007, she endeavored to capture the dualistic temporality that is at once fleeting and continuous, by using the subtle differentiation and repetition available in this format. ⁶ By painting photographs of the same subject that were shot multiple times within 0.5 to 1 second of one another, the series leaves room for imagining the moments before and after the subject was captured. Nonetheless, Park’s strokes are made quickly, and because of the speed of her process, the paintings inevitably do not simply remain an accumulation of moments expressed in smudged brushstrokes. Following ‘Lomography’, she continued experimenting with translating photography into painting, pushing beyond the simple collection of moments captured by photographs, in series such as Happy New Night and Moontan. In particular, she responded sensitively to the visual conditions created during the night, where due to the limited amount of light, not only does the artist’s experience of visual recognition and perception become restricted, but there is also a significant difference between the scene captured by the camera and the actual lived experience. The artist is attempting a new painterly approach using this disparity between the eye of the camera and that of the artist at night, transferring to her painting the photographic composition with figures and backgrounds seemingly distorted due to the camera flash. In the Moontan series, she deliberately chose the scene captured by the camera instead of her own vision, placing flash-flattened figures against an evenly black background. By using this technique, the images appear in sharp relief, reminiscent of a stage set for actors. ⁷ However, these images, captured by the camera’s eye, do not represent a single distinct moment. Her paintings still aim to express the totality of events by recombining and composing multiple moments. The camera’s eye is merely a tool to enhance this totality.

Given this distinctive process, how is the totality of an event achieved in Park’s paintings? The artist’s compositions differ from the totality of the philosopher Georg Lukács, which combines human agency as a subject that has social cognition and understanding as well as the will to transform both humanity and the world. It also differs from Theodor W. Adorno’s totality, which emphasizes recognizing the multifaceted aspects of reality through various subjects and objects intertwined as a “Konstellation.” ⁸ Instead, the totality conveyed by the artist’s painting is a conduit for integrating Deleuzian events that continuously unfold between the past and the present. According to Gilles Deleuze, the event is in a constant state of “becoming,” creating new possibilities between actions that trigger the event and the body that produces these actions.⁹ No event (or object) has a definitive beginning or end, and actions occurring in the interim infinitely expand the possibilities of an event as in parallel universes. Thus, in order for a painting to represent the event in totality, it too must remain in a state of constant change or “becoming.” This means the painter’s body, which observes the situation of the event, must also transform, so that the representation achieved by the changing body can continuously aim for this state of “becoming.”

From the moment Park takes a photograph to the completion of the painting, she continuously recognizes the endlessly changing conditions and works to expand the possibilities for change. “I take photographs to save interesting scenes and gestures I find in daily life. However, there are various inexplicable reasons that make a scene interesting enough to capture at a particular moment,” the artist said in an interview. “I take many photographs and combine multiple images as I paint. In between the solid yet loose drawings, a painting seems to emerge that is both frozen and alive in time.”¹⁰ Stage Arrangement 01 and Stage Arrangement 02, both from 2021, are depictions of people tidying up along with objects waiting to be put away after a performance. In these pieces, which primarily feature people moving a grand piano, rearranging chairs, and putting away music stands, the figures appear as if they are momentarily frozen in time. Captured at a random moment, their facial expressions and awkward poses look as though the artist has taxidermized the instant she photographed. In contrast, the chairs, piano, and music stands have multiple overlapping silhouettes. In Stage Arrangement 02, the legs of chairs carried by a man moving two chairs at once are rendered with overlapping lines, as if they are traces of overpainted lines corrected by the artist. The overlapping lines suggest that the objects are both obviously there and yet simultaneously in motion. In those wavering legs, there is the past, present and the future of the chair. Such waver in time can also be seen in the light and shadows falling on the background of the figures and objects; the unclear boundary between the light around the music stands behind the piano and the shadow pushed by the light, and the thin line between the floor and the wall created by ambiguous light in Stage Arrangement 01. In each, there is the suggestion that the artist is not painting from a photograph but rather from the overall situation of the scene she has observed, and the sum of the memories of these situations. Moreover, seemingly intentionally, the artist adds a sense of haste to her changes of the light and shadow by leaving traces of brush strokes; in Stage Arrangement 02, the areas mixed with white and the shadowy regions darkened by overlapping colors are swept in the direction of busy brushstrokes, dancing either in or against the direction of the person holding the music stands.

In all paintings here, the artist never hides the fact that the depicted image is simultaneously a representation of something and a lump of paint. The drip marks on the stage steps may have been made while painting, or they could be actual paint marks on the stage. The faint vertical lines on the surface of the painting could be brush marks, or the effects of lighting seen by the artist while watching the stage cleanup, or light shadows accidentally captured in a photograph. These paintings represent the topsy-turvy itinerary of making a painting by crossing the boundary between the frozen and wavering time, as well as the line between the object, the photography and the painting. In the process, time moves forward and backward, stays in the present, and revisits the past, while the images we see oscillate among an object, a photographic likeness, and masses of painterly pigment.

Meanwhile, the artist often represents the ever-changing conditions of an event from the beginning of a painting or the choice of a scene, thereby selecting the moments just before or after the end of an event as subjects of her representation. She explains “(I am) very interested in the process towards completion of an event and have paid much attention to painting the image of the story behind something completed.”¹¹ This attention to time is clear in Public Sculpture 02 (2021), Packing (2021), and Light Man (2021) that depict artworks, the installation and deinstallation of an exhibition—familiar subjects for Park. In all of these scenes, the artist captures moments before or after the completion of an event, under the assumption that situations are moving toward completion. Scenes of large installations being set up or dismantled outside late at night, or of a technician checking a light for an unexpected glitch, prompt the viewer to imagine not only the exact moment the artist took the photograph but the time before and after that as well. The light held by the technician is part of the equipment needed for a completed installation, and the technician is staring at the light as if inspecting it. Imagination is required to interpret the scene and give it context: is the technician checking a possibly broken light, examining its position and brightness, or verifying its shape and size? Depending on the viewer’s experience, there can be many different interpretations. Glimpses of a camera and a cameraman on the left of the canvas provide a hint, suggesting this is a scene of a camera testing with the lighting. But surely, there are multiple interpretations. What matters is that a preparation for something is underway, and the artist’s aim is to express the past, present, and future in the painting by representing this in-between moment. As in the Stage Arrangement series, the light held by the figure also fluctuates like smoke against a yellow wall. In contrast, the floor and wall, dividing the vertically positioned light and the figure, strongly seize our attention. Unlike the constantly moving flow of light or the direction of brushstrokes, the division between the wall and floor strongly dominates the entire scene–enough to freeze the event between the figure and the light. Through this division between the floor and the wall, the event transcends the representation of reality, floating between the dark brown and bright yellow surfaces, recasting the scene. Is the overwhelming and powerful division of colors and the surfaces photographed by chance? Or are they reflective of the real colors in the event?

Hints to these questions can be found in other paintings like Public Sculpture 02 and Rehearsal 03. In Public Sculpture 02, a massive blue surface covers the foreground, minimizing the images of people installing, the glossy floor, the blurry trees, and the buildings in the background. Turning from dark blue to lighter blue and then to white, this massive blue surface dominates the foreground of the painting. A similar overall strategy applies to ‘Rehearsal 03’. Although titled “Rehearsal,” the entire painting, except for two relatively small figures and a pile of chairs in the upper right, is dominated by an expanse of blue floor stained by red lighting. The vivid orange lighting divides the vast floor soaked in blue and orange like the Red Sea. And what visually interrupts this floor is not an event but only another rectangular white wall. By saturating her scenes with such large planes of theatrical lighting, Park allows the images to transcend the likeness of photographs and their painterly representation, so that the event moves from specific reality into the realm of abstraction. This can be understood in light of Michael Fried, who locates the absence of direct signs of desire in representation at the advent of abstraction. For Fried, the emergence of modern art began with painting or visual images rejecting direct expressions of desire and avoiding any indication of the direction of desire.¹² In his view, the inherent nature of painting has a “Medusa Effect,” which attracts and arrests the beholder in front of an image, arguing that the most effective strategy for a modern painting is to pretend not to desire anything. In his views, the ultimate goal of painting is to achieve the beholder’s absorption through the internal drama intrinsic to the painting while excluding the beholder and minimizing theatrical effects.¹³ Fried’s perspective greatly contributed to a significant rise of abstraction in modern art, where the beholder’s gaze converges on the colors, surfaces, and lines within the canvas. Similarly, in Park’s images, which traverse real events, photographs, and the artist’s painterly translation, the space within the painting, which recedes into blue, orange, or white fields and brushstrokes, provides an internal logic to the painting. This reinforces a focus on the internal storytelling informed by her choices of colors, shapes, lines, and surfaces, beyond the desire for representation. This internal narrative frees her paintings from direct representation, allowing her to distance them from specific events and figures, and leaves open the possibility of filling the abstract void with something more infinite. In her compositions, the eye-catching abstract masses are drawn from actual objects and backgrounds, yet they belong in the constructed (fictional) internal drama that the artist came up with in the process of painting—through her reconstruction and reinterpretation of those moments captured in her photographs.

While Fried emphasizes the narrative of internal conflict and tension within the canvas—rejecting externally oriented desire for denotation in the path to abstraction, W. J. T. Mitchell, following Jacques Lacan’s theory, argues that Fried’s so-called absence of desire is itself another form of desire. Analyzing Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) (1981), Mitchell contrasted the indifference conveyed through the profile of the statue with its empty look, against the violent and ominous title. This image of the statue does not express nor proclaim its desire. Kruger reveals through the title “Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face” that it is the viewer who stares at the face, and not the image, that possesses or reveals desire. The statue could be read as either female or male, cunningly hiding its expression in shadows and what Kruger’s reading of the image and text summons is the viewer’s thoughts (or prejudices) and the artist’s desire to invoke them.¹⁴ In Park’s works, when the desire for representation is removed, and pictorial forms generate internal drama, a new desire inevitably emerges between the acts of removal and creation.

Let’s return to the beginning of the text and revisit Park’s painting Night Tree. The artist probably photographed a tree she saw in darkness, combining several scenes to complete the work. As the silhouettes of the branches and leaves are fluid and the light source is absent, this painting consists of a series of imaginable moments that together work to convey the totality of the “Night Tree” event. This image lacks direct signs of desire for representation just as Kruger’s profile does. Night Tree does not strive to deliver a specific message or to achieve a likeness to an actual object. It is the internal drama of the painting that fills the void left by the absence of direct representational desire, capturing attention like the head of Medusa. The black-blueish green mass gleams as it disperses and reassembles while the green and the black endlessly battle on the borderline; and the dark night on the edges of the canvas continues to expand horizontally, pulled by the brushstroke.

What does this internal drama represent? Hints to this question lie in the work’s title, not in the image. The mass in this abstract painting is still the “Night Tree.” The internal drama represented and generated by this painting is the internal vortex of the artist (in the past) evoked by the “Night Tree,” as well as the internal vortex of the viewers (in the present and future) created by the intense expression of the non-denotative painting and its title. Inevitably, this vortex ceaselessly changes and cannot be confined. This is because the cognition of the pictorial object begins with the understanding already present in perception itself and is completed through endless comparison and analysis of previously recognized situations.¹⁵ Again, it is through the interpretation of Mitchell, who saw this internal vortex as a new possibility in painting, that we can gain access to Park’s intention. Mitchell points out that, through the recognition and interpretation of images stirred by this internal vortex, painting can be evoked as a communicative sign, distinct from words or texts. Paintings delivered through the internal vortex are not fixed but animated signs. Also, the subjects interpreting these signs are not wholly independent or completely fragmented selves, but exist as go-betweens who cross different visualities in the contemporary society with different experiences and functions, thus enhancing understanding and interpretation through painting. What matters is that painting as a sign does not convey the viewer’s desire, the artist’s intention, or even the style of painting. Instead of binding itself to a fixed meaning, it seeks through dialogue with others the ever-changing meaning of the self.¹⁶ In this way, the painting Night Tree depicts the collective sum of the past, present, future, imagination, and the reality of the tree pictured. The night tree as seen by the artist in the past, and the night trees she remembers. The night tree of the present expressed through painterly means and other night trees witnessed by others. The fictional night trees that have been imagined, and the memory, feeling, emotion, color, line and plane of night trees. The painting Night Tree is completed as a new sign that embodies the totality of social symbolism and meaning in deciphering the night and a tree.