I. Idea Box

Drawing has long been a pillar of Park Junghae’s creative practice, not only as a daily exercise for stimulating her imagination and exploring new ideas, but also as an artistic medium unto itself. In many cases, her colorful works on paper appear to be smaller executions of the same abstract shapes and compositional rhetorics found in her paintings. Sometimes, however, she expands this methodology to create sprawling arrangements of visual elements imbued with a geometric sensibility. Grids of various scales serve as frameworks for Park’s large-scale drawings, which are composed of multiple individual sheets of paper lined up edge to edge that constitute a patchwork grid of their own. Although the outlines of various forms are clearly delineated in these expansive drawings, their interior volumes are left empty, resulting in ghostlike silhouettes that expose lattices of ever-present gridlines beneath.

Park’s recent drawing Zettelkasten (2024) amplifies this aesthetic by inverting color values – images are rendered in white and pale pastels over a matte black ground –to generate a photonegative effect. Areas of subtle shading and muted gradients yield variable levels of translucence that elicit a sense of flattened depth within the picture plane, reminiscent of an overhead X-ray scan. The array of individual images that appear scattered within the bounds of ‘Zettelkasten’ hints at the meaning of the drawing’s title: a German term for a collection of notes, each containing a discrete bit of information, written on cards and organized according to a cross-referential filing method. As a personal knowledge management system, the concept of the Zettelkasten was formalized by German social scientist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998), who amassed tens of thousands of individual notecards that formed a web of ideas he referred to as his “secondary memory.”*

The Zettelkasten method is non-linear, recursive and relational, allowing for unexpected connections between previously recorded thoughts and newly acquired knowledge. This is particularly useful for large repositories of information such as Luhmann’s, but can also be applied to collections of loose-leaf drawings preserved by artists like Park. While she may not organize her sketches in a particularly systematic fashion, her archive serves the same purpose within her practice; nothing is lost or forgotten and is always available if the need arises to extract it from storage. It is in this spirit that the “idea box” visualized in Park’s Zettelkasten acquires significance as an indexical overview of the motifs and structures that inform her most recent body of work.


 
II. Emptiness Anxiety

The word “storage” implies the presence of something to be safeguarded, whether it is kept in a physical space, on a digital server or inside one’s own brain. By extension, anything not deposited within such a cache is put at risk of being misplaced or erased. While this may seem undesirable from a conventional standpoint, there are numerous instances when things are deliberately not stored, especially if they are easily replaceable, outdated or hazardous. For some people, the very notion of storage conjures thoughts of compulsive hoarders who find it impossible to part with their belongings, regardless of value or function. For Park, such thoughts give rise to alternative interpretations of storage systems and psychologies of aggregation.

There is a strange human impulse to fill the empty spaces we encounter – a subconscious discomfort that arises whenever we are faced with the voids of everyday life. Our desire to fill awkward silences in casual conversations or to cram as many things as possible into a suitcase reflects the way that our brains have been conditioned to release dopamine in a response to converting emptiness into fullness. This is likely a byproduct of how we fundamentally perceive empty space as an awareness of absence, or a potential location for physical objects. The very idea of the void is thus predicated upon something that is missing, reinforcing a cerebral dialectic that explains why empty storage spaces compel us to put things inside.

An artist’s sketchbook begs to be filled with future drawings, delivering a sense of accomplishment when the last page has been used. This, in turn, stimulates an urge to begin afresh with another sketchbook in an iterative cycle of accumulation and renewal. In the digital age, a more familiar storage paradigm is premised upon optimizing digital storage spaces for maximum efficiency, whether it be the internal memory of a modern smartphone or the hard drive of a computer. Any time we find ourselves running out of available space, we are forced attempt to compress, consolidate or reduce the amount of data that we choose to keep, transferring the rest to cloud storage solutions or physical backups.

One notable exception to these examples is the modern refrigerator, which is too large an appliance for most households to augment with an additional unit. As such, it is essential to periodically discard items in order to make space for the endless intake of new foodstuffs. While some items such as condiments are essentially non-perishable and can be kept for long intervals, other staples such as produce, meat and dairy products are temporary occupants that must be used within a limited amount of time or replaced with fresh items. As a hybrid storage system, the refrigerator represents a specific yet ubiquitous case study of collection management, as well as an idiosyncratic subject for visual abstraction.

III. Internal Temperature

In contrast to much of her prior oeuvre, Park’s recent paintings emanate chilly energy. The greens, yellows and browns that once dominated her palette have been replaced with blues, purples and greys; likewise, the amorphous abstract forms that her work has long been associated with have become more angular and planar, yielding compositions that connote rigid, man-made structures rather than rounded, organic entities. The overall impression that arises from this new body of work is one of stillness and stability, in keeping with Park’s recent conceptual interest in modes of storage and archival systems. As a result, the spaces suggested by her paintings appear as if held in a state of suspension – containers kept cold for the sake of long-term preservation.

Such an approach to energy management is the objective of refrigeration as we know it today. Each item stored within this controlled climate introduces its own level of temperature and moisture, which are then slowly brought into equilibrium with the environmental conditions within. In this way, the refrigerator effectively neutralizes the energies intrinsic to its contents, but only as long as there is a steady flow of external power to keep its system operational. If the electricity is interrupted or the unit’s hermetic insulation is compromised, condensation will begin to form inside as the ambient temperature increases, facilitating the spread of bacteria and mold spores as its perishable items decay. By the same token, if the refrigerator’s thermometer is improperly calibrated, its cooling mechanism may go into overdrive, leading to the formation of ice crystals as internal moisture becomes frozen.

Park hints at both scenarios in her works – paintings that use warm colors appear flecked with dark spots as if harboring colonies of mold, while those rendered in blues and blacks reveal white droplets indicative of frost. As for the figurative elements depicted in these refrigerated chambers, their motifs connect with her previous bodies of works while introducing imagery that derives from Park’s visual research into cold storage environments and the transformation of energy within such spaces. Her painted forms evoke the physical components of refrigerators (condenser coils, evaporator fans, compressors) while also connoting storage structures more broadly (shelves, drawers, containers). Constant throughout all these works are references to paper as physical manifestations of the Zettelkasten method, which in Park’s case implies the incessant creation of drawings that are catalogued and cross-referenced as an integral aspect of her artistic inquiry.



IV. Reanimation

Whenever we open the refrigerator, we undertake a visual inventory of its contents before selecting items to pull out, engaging in a process of perusal that often elicits new ideas for experimental recipes. Just as a finished meal comes together through the synthesis of individual ingredients removed from cold storage, Park’s paintings take shape through an ongoing process of exploration of relationships and possibilities suggested by the imagery that populates her drawings. Her trove of drawings serves as a nexus between ideas and images that are not a static collection of abstract forms, but an animated set of conceptual connections in a perpetual state of flux.

Both a dynamic mode of storage and a potent cognitive tool, the Zettelkasten method underscores the most salient aspects of Park’s distinct mode of creative expression. Each new painting recontextualizes her previously recorded thoughts, integrating the imperatives of the present and fostering emergent revelations and interpretations that forge novel modes of thinking. As such, Park’s paintings concretize her contemporary observations of previous drawings through the convergence of motifs from her own “secondary memory,” which resolve into compositions that are anything but derivative. Rather than being merely catalogued and cached, the drawings that fill Park’s personal archive are meant to be continually revised and reconstituted on canvas. By presenting a selection of images from this visual vault in her large-scale drawing Zettelkasten, the artist invites us to join in her open-ended analysis of resonances between remembered forms, colors and their associated energies.


* Johannes F.K. Schmidt, “Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine” in Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alberto Cevolini (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 289-311.

References

• [비평] 장기 저장소
  [Critique] Long-term storage