The
Robert Pickton case—the Vancouver, Canada pig farmer who, over 30 years, killed
69 women and used their remains as pig feed; the Virginia Tech shooting by Cho
Seung-hui; the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the Exxon Valdez
oil spill….
Yoon
Young Park (41) is a runaway locomotive without brakes. Even in an art world
brimming with imagination, hers stands out. Encountering her works’ fearless
subjects and then meeting the artist in person—slender in appearance and
soft-spoken—one is startled by the dissonance. Park’s works are detective
novels painted in images. She appropriates and interweaves pre-existing
stories—film, opera, ballet, fiction, song, even murder cases—to construct
narratives of her own.
Her
representative work, Pickton Lake (2005), takes a
Canadian murder case as its basic framework and, seizing on the motif of
“disappearing women,” connects the ballet Swan Lake and
David Lynch’s film Twin Peaks. At points, it also taps
into the musical The Phantom of the Opera and even
Hemingway’s fiction. Casting herself as detective, the artist pursues what has
vanished and, beneath surfaces that are dazzling and beautiful, uncovers a
horrific underside of abuse, sacrifice, and trauma. In the subsequent
works Journey to Akeldama and Ixtlan
Stop, this method grows even more intricate.
What
becomes even more striking is her original mode of expression. As she braids
disparate sources, she refuses to be bound by genre or medium. After rewriting
the reconstructed story into text, she distributes the crucial, compelling
fragments across folding screens, hanging scrolls, video, and newspaper
clippings to form a kind of composite installation. This dovetails with the
very character of her practice—binding heterogeneous elements together. Though
trained in Korean painting and often employing screens and scrolls, she cannot
be confined to the label of “Oriental painting” alone.
Nor
should Park be mistaken for an artist of ideas only. In her studio, before
paints, brushes, and paper, one first notices newspapers, cameras, photographic
references, novels, and records. She personally visited crime scenes and
courtrooms to research real murder cases. For the sake of immediacy in her
work, she learned electric guitar and studied classical Chinese at a seodang
(traditional village school).
It
is true that approaching her work requires a fair amount of prior knowledge.
Yet as viewers unravel the many clues the artist has embedded, there comes a
moment when they realize that the true protagonist of these works is the viewer
themselves. That is because her subjects are rooted in our everyday lives.
Artist Bio
Yoon Young Park (b. 1968, Seoul) received both her BFA and MFA from the
Department of Korean Painting at Ewha Woman’s University. She lives and works
between Seoul and Vancouver, Canada. She describes her practice as “a kind of
total art that blends documentary, detective fiction, drama, surrealism, and a
puzzle game to be solved by the audience.”
Her
solo exhibitions include 《Ixtlan Stop》 and 《Pickton Lake》, and she has participated in group exhibitions such as 《Art Spectrum 2006》 at the Leeum, Samsung
Museum of Art, the 《Anyang Public Art Project》, and the 《Gwangju Biennale》. Her works are held in the collections of the National Museum of
Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Leeum, and others.
