Installation view © Mongin Art Center

Located in Samcheong-dong, Jongno-gu, Mongin Art Center presented Yoon Young Park’s solo exhibition 《Red Fish up the River》 from August 31 to October 31, 2010.

This exhibition, held three years after her 2007 solo show Ixland Stop at Arario Gallery in Cheonan, continues her exploration across various media such as drawing, video, and installation. Park has consistently reinterpreted not only art and art history but also film, literature, history, opera, music, and contemporary events from a deeply personal perspective.

Entitled 《Red Fish up the River》, the exhibition builds upon the series that includes Voyage of the Black Bird—shown at the 2009 Hermès Foundation Art Award exhibition—and the unpublished script Noah’s Blue Star. Together, they comprise the ‘Black Wing’ series, which was inspired by “a glass marble given to the artist by her seven-year-old nephew,” a motif that continues to unfold into new episodes.


Yoon Young Park, Taunting, 2010, ink on paper, 30 x 21 cm © Mongin Art Center

Park’s work begins at the intersection between an “invisible world” and an “artist who relentlessly excavates the truths embedded there.”

The narrative, which began with Voyage of the Black Bird—a story oscillating between reality and imagination—takes a darker turn as it incorporates traumatic historical incidents, such as the abuse that occurred in Catholic-run Indigenous boarding schools in North America during the mid-19th to early 20th century. This blending of “future, past, and darkness” opens up multiple dimensions within the artist’s long and unresolved narrative journey.

Park’s extensive and mysterious text, which functions as both foundation and reflection, creates layers of complex meaning as viewers encounter and depart from the works.

Unfolding across the two floors of Mongin Art Center—which resemble a passage between the underground and the surface—Park’s narrative on “future, past, and darkness” merges the diverse texts she invokes with the major and minor incidents unfolding in our surroundings. In doing so, the exhibition transforms the space into a complete and mysterious world, organically shaped by the artist’s unique worldview.

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