금호미술관

Self-reflection and the Repetition of Life Experiences

Hee-young Kim (Kookmin University)

With the intriguing title of “self-replica,” Young-nam Park invites us to his solo exhibition this fall. Park says that the entire course of his painting is a perpetual process of replicating himself. This is a bold statement, which challenges the Modernist premise of ‘originality.' While having made a significant contribution to the development of Korean abstract painting, he claims that his abstraction does not rely on the self-sufficient and purely aesthetic principle. Park aims to reach the beauty through constant ‘gestures of negation' and ‘accumulating impurities.' It is a refusal of the Modernist premise, which prioritizes the aesthetic value based on originality and the medium-specificity. Park's subtle invitation provokes a challenge to the seemingly invincible faith in the Modernist aesthetic.  

Post-WWII American abstract painting made a significant influence on the course of Park's growth as painter. While having studied in New York and received an MFA degree in painting, Park gained solid understanding of the work of New York School as well as the theories of Hans Hoffmann and Clement Greenberg. In his search for ways to approach the world with his act of painting, however, he has taken Modernist theories as a part of his effort to build on a relation between his life, work, and the world. Facing nature, he has visualized the intuition drawn from nature, thereby creating ‘another form of nature' on canvas. Color is form, for Park, thus painting does not need to get translated, nor does music. This may sound as if he believes in the specificity of painting medium and the aesthetic autonomy. Color for him, however, is not one that is measurable, but one that defies theoretical predictions and only can be perceived in experiences. Park's canvas registers various traces of his life experiences. Canvas is a ground, in which reason and emotion interact with each other, encountering both order and disorder. Canvas is the medium, with which to link his life experiences, and another space and time.

Every artist refers to history, implicitly or explicitly. Historical masterpieces could serve as sources of inspiration for other artists. Referring to Vincent van Gogh and Piet Mondrian for sources of expressive and abstract elements respectively, Park has sought ways in which subjective emotion and rational control can coexist. Replicated in theme in a various scale, Landscape against Blue Sky series reveals his perpetual process of self-reflection. The course of replication resonates with Hans Richter, who experimented with abstract film by means of basic form changes, Agnes Martin whose repetitive grids record the process of her contemplation, or anonymous stained-glass makers who decorated windows in medieval cathedrals. Park's canvas is a ground, on which many artists' endeavor to address constant changes in nature, light, dynamics, and feelings could interact with. It is an arena in which to copy and reshape one another. There is no hierarchy between the old and the new. The old encourages the new to create further. Thus, canvas is the ground of growth and life. It is made in the perpetual course of his replication without predetermined plans.

Park has once said, “I used to think that a painter is someone who paints. But I've come to realize that a painter is someone who makes something, moreover who cultivates life.” It implies his belief in art as life and in artist's task to cultivate life. This is reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi, abstract sculptor, who said that “it is not difficult to make things. What is difficult is to put ourselves in the proper condition to make them.” Therefore the work of art belongs to this moment of potency. Park's understanding of painter as someone who cultivates life is comparable to Willem de Kooning who wrote that “painting is a way of living. That is where its form lies.” Art, for de Kooning, “must discover its form in the actuality of the artist's life, it cannot impose itself upon its practitioner […] Art becomes a Way by which to avoid a Way.”[1] This statement sheds insightful light on Park's daring statement that his work is self-replica, which challenges the Formalist aesthetics seeking a novelty in form. For Park, canvas is an arena that has infinite potency of expansion, while embracing the universal and historical reflection and criticism on the condition of painting. The perpetual repetition of self-replica on canvas indicates the process of self-reflection. The very course of constant self-transformation surpassing the aesthetic evolution in form is the essence of ‘modernity' in art.