Poster image of 《2013GOHAP404》 © COMMON CENTER

At COMMON CENTER, Park Kyung Ryul’s solo exhibition 《2013GOHAP404》 is presented across the first and second floors.

Law employs the most rational language possible in order to avoid causing misunderstandings among the parties for whom it is written. Judicial precedents, which may be regarded as the application of law to individual cases, cannot avoid ambiguous language in which absolute standards are difficult to establish—much like the characters assigned to actors in a drama.

This exhibition presents a new series of paintings based on the judicial precedent of a case bearing the rigid title “2013GOHAP404.” In other words, it is about capturing the gap between the language of reason and the language of emotion, and the process of transforming that moment into images.


Installation view of 《2013GOHAP404》 © COMMON CENTER

The works on view are installed within a space staged much like a theatrical set. After constructing a setting in which an incident unfolds, Park arranges images containing individual narratives according to the movement of the viewer’s gaze.

As a result, the figures that repeatedly appear throughout the works reinterpret a single event from different perspectives, much like Rashomon, in which the protagonist continually shifts. The works presented here therefore embody a desire to continually break away from the fixed original text of the judicial precedent.

While the first floor of COMMON CENTER consists of one large exhibition hall, the second floor is divided into a series of smaller rooms. In this exhibition, the two floors are configured as mirror structures in a certain sense: the overall imagery presented on the first floor may be reconsidered and reflected upon on the second floor, while the more detailed experience of the second floor may, in turn, alter one’s interpretation of the works installed downstairs.

Furthermore, the countless processes of calculation involved in producing a single image are revealed throughout the exhibition space in forms other than painting, allowing viewers to glimpse the logic of sensation that gradually progresses from judicial precedent toward painting.


Installation view of 《2013GOHAP404》 © COMMON CENTER

Park Kyung Ryul has consistently developed her work by first writing short fictional scenarios akin to literary narratives. In a previous solo exhibition, she conducted interviews with dementia patients and experimented with recombining the fragmented language that emerged from those conversations. This process constitutes a central thread that extends into the present exhibition.

For the artist, painterly experimentation is both a strategy for addressing the question of what to paint and an attempt to examine a fundamental challenge shared by painters: how to translate linguistic material into a visual and perceptual language. Judicial precedents, from which emotion has been deliberately stripped away, are adapted by the artist into specific narrative structures.

As the tragedies experienced by the figures within them are reconstructed, a series of layered narrative images ultimately comes into being.

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