Metaverse Made with a Heated Inclination
 
These are somehow strange paintings. We see titles closely attached to life: A Fallen Person(2020), Restaurant(2020), A Child Who Doesn’t Want to Eat(2021), Break Room(2021), Reading the Room(2021)… Yet among Dasom Park’s works, there are no kindly descriptions or perfectly fitting representations drawn from everyday trivialities that match those subjects or titles. We may hope for a unity between title and image, but it is rarely realized. If the titles were hidden and the viewer were left to puzzle solely from the images, the likelihood of arriving directly at the artist’s assigned titles would seem slim.

In a world where countless works are processed as Untitled, where expecting realistic representation has long become a naive hope, where images need not be subordinate to text, where Dasom Park’s works are neither illustrations for poems nor novels, and where we certainly do not desire one-dimensional depictions or schematic drawings—why do paintings that repeatedly provoke the question of what this is and what that is feel even more, and more, unfamiliar?
 
The refined color palette and bold compositions certainly offer sensory pleasure, yet the spectacle provided by meticulous description or special subject matter, and the readable elements offered by rhetorical technique or art-historical context, are close to blank. And yet, why do these paintings—less like modest diaries of ordinary life and more like the diary of some otaku—continue to hold our gaze? The omitted and transformed images within Dasom Park’s canvases appear cold rather than passionately expressive.

The atmosphere of works that maintain coolness and composure produces a peculiar tension derived from aiming at neither expressive content nor abstract form. Meanwhile, forms that seem to extend roots into some unknown world emit a sense of inevitability and irreversibility. There even appears a boldness that could only emerge from some inner conviction, along with a strange aura that accompanies it.

If we delay the impulse to discover resemblance to the human figure within Dasom Park’s images, what becomes visible are partially severed forms, fragments separated from their bodies and floating in midair, loosely combined elements that seem as though they might fall apart at the slightest touch, and a sense of Chaos. In this process, what draws attention is the overall “operation of space” within the canvas. Even in early works such as Dance(2017) and At the Corner(2017), the consistent point that captured viewers’ attention was the refined color, the sensual brushwork, and above all, the Viewpoint.

The transformation of viewpoint may be a challenge to everything that can be attempted within two-dimensional painting. Variations of Spacial Dimension—such as erecting the ground plane into a vertical surface or mixing different viewpoints of spaces and objects within a single frame. This free yet chaotic multi-dimensional mixture continues the thread of early works, which often addressed dreams and were treated from a bird’s-eye view.
 
Dasom Park’s artistic world cannot be reduced to a modest diary of ordinary life, nor to formal experimentation. The images veiled within her paintings are characterized by omission, arbitrary combination, bold expression and placement, and suspension in midair—like a blackout of chaos and destruction that defiantly rejects and dismantles every rule, density, and solidity existing on earth. Yet the loosely emptied spaces and objects lacking specificity are surprisingly not expulsions of spontaneous emotion but exist at the edges of continuous observation and contemplation, near something like the damonisch that refuses to leave the mind.

The paintings of an artist who seems never to have escaped the valley of thought paradoxically move toward leaving only minimal traces. What ultimately remains on the canvas are colliding multi-dimensional viewpoints, a vacuum state in which gravity has disappeared, forms that bend, collapse, fall away, and crash, and compositions filled with emptiness.
 
Looking at Dasom Park’s notes, one realizes that she watches with sorrow and anxiety the inevitability of aging and death—especially the unavoidable aging process of the elders she loves—and that, for reasons unknown, she remains deeply bound to these thoughts. Expressions such as upright or straight inherently imply that bent and curved forms are negative. Yet recently, Dasom Park confesses that she is emerging from a dark tunnel through works that filter everything through the prism of “inclination” embodied in the drunken body, the falling body, and the bent body of the elderly.

From the negative perspective that bent and tilted lines represent pain and decline, she seeks positive meaning. She removes all concrete forms and narrative details, leaving only inclination—that is, the abstract motif of the tilted line. This produces the result of painful reality being transformed into another tone after changing filters. One cannot know why gloomy thoughts—that every life is merely a series of moments on the way to death—came to dominate her mind, but by creating a new world composed of tilted forms, she evokes the predictable conclusion of life like a black comedy. It is a kind of theater and play.

In fact, the world presented in her canvases is something possible only in dreams or Science Fiction. Scenes where dimensions mix, floors rise, people float in midair, or are transformed into grotesque forms or reduced to bent shapes. The fact that the dream world connects with SF—science fiction—is a highly interesting point. Science is realizing in reality the unreal images of the unconscious. The transcendental imaginary world once possible only in dreams is now literally becoming reality. Did we foresee an era in which all would agree that the development of science and technology would become the foremost messenger transporting the immaterial world of imagination and dreams into the material world?

Not merely a civilization of technology maximizing convenience and efficiency, but a world that completely relocates a land-based world into an underwater one. We witness the paradox that the ultimate origin of the world produced by advanced science is irrational and unscientific. Before being realized through technology and entering our sensory world, dreams and imagination were treated as absurd delusions or the beliefs of the weak; yet the history of most scientific inventions is one of repeated reversals of such perceptions.
 
An object that cannot be neatly defined is likely the arrival of something entirely new. The Metaverse—a new virtual world and new real world combining online and reality, another universe. The Avatar, a character representing oneself in online space, existed already more than twenty years ago but remained at the level of doll play confined within the premise of illusion. However, in the hyper-connected metaverse intertwined with reality, avatars engage in actual shopping, attend performances, learn new choreography, receive autographs at celebrity signings—living out nearly everything of reality.

A world that could not previously be defined by anything is being constructed upon science and technology. Thus, the non-linguistic, non-rational, indefinable world is reborn not as falsehood but as truth, another version of reality. If something possessing specific structures, philosophies, and detailed elements can be called a world, then Dasom Park’s world of “inclination” also exists as a new universe. Emerging from the dark tunnel of the unconscious and confronting the realities of fear and sorrow head-on, the artist’s alternative—“inclination”—becomes her universe, a kind of metaverse that coexists in hyper-intimate proximity with reality.
 
Dasom Park’s “inclination” can also carry the following meanings. First, whether the subject is human or object, is inclination itself truly a useful theme? This is an intriguing point to note, as it reveals the artist’s unique perspective and new value arising from fundamental compassion and pity toward human existence. Second, through the frame of compassion called inclination, both humans and objects enter into equal relations. The act of substituting everything with inclination becomes a spell that removes hierarchy. When all are converted into inclination, they become equal. Third, this may also be the most artistic attempt.

Following the idea that art is essentially surplus, one realizes that Dasom Park’s art lies at the extreme edge of surplus among surplus worlds. A world of inclination based on uselessness, irrationality, the unconscious, discontinuity, disappearance, and dismantling. Its artistic value is great. Freud elevated dreams in psychoanalysis as important clues for interpreting reality and consciousness, but we have now moved into an entirely different dimension. Physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and scientists assume the world to be largely non-linear and chaotic, and upon that foundation pursue diverse research problems and solutions. Who can declare dreams or fantasies obscene? Who can call Dasom Park’s “heated inclination,” derived from gazing at loved ones, and the metaverse created by that frame and structure, useless obscenity?

 
Text by Kim So-won

References

• 《검은개의 집 (House of Hunched Back)》