Park Kyung Ryul, Vulnerable Drawing No.144 - Girls Chasing a Bird, 2013, Oil on terra paper, 117 x 130 cm © Park Kyung Ryul

The paintings I had seen of the artist Park Kyung Ryul were tanglements of images that seemed as if everything inside the head had been thrown up on top of massive canvases. One day, the artist talked about a drawing project based on conversations with demented elders, and I was curious about what relation it would come to have with the artist’s work up until that moment. 

This next project, which will be held in Willing N Dealing, could probably well become the next step in creating a new style for the artist and might even allow us to unexpectedly reach an intimate relation to her existing works. This is how the project goes: its subjects are the artist’s paternal grandmother and the elders that are under the care of the Dementia Community Center of Yongsan-gu.

Together, they talk about the old days and make drawings. The artist regularly meets with three elders and pulls stories out of their old memories. In conversations with demented elders, out of the blue, famous people or off-the-wall nouns referring to themselves appear, like “I am yellow”. While listening to their stories and identifying, one by one, the associated images inside their heads, each of the elders’drawings were revealed.

Their stories usually dwell in the past as incoherent, and although their current situations are blank slates, they talk about memories that are more than 60 years old, as clearly as if they had happened yesterday. Most of their stories are reproduced with the artist’s hand, and the coloring work is done by the elders.

The elders were interviewed to tell stories of the old days, tracing back their own memories. The stories were put into a fake documentary film, with the woven stories fabricated into a single story of an elderly actress.


Park Kyung Ryul, Vulnerable Drawing No.131 - A Wedding Day, 2013, Oil, acrylic, oil pastel, and coloured pencil on terra paper, 150 x 150 cm © Park Kyung Ryul

After finishing the project at the dementia center, I visited the artist’s studio. The artist took out massive drawings, little drawings, drawings of the elders, films – all of which will be installed and shown in the exhibition. The artist talked about the personal change that she underwent while doing this project.

The artist’s original working style was to collage her experiences and memory into a composition on the canvas, stirring the field of ‘unconsciousness.’ In this project, the artist wanted to embark on a persistent investigation of ‘drawing unconsciously.’ According to the artist’s words, the moment something is expressed, it is bound to be in the state of consciousness, even‘it had been drawn unconsciously’.

Therefore, the hypothesis which the artist comes to is this: “unconsciousness is consciousness that is in the unperceivable range. In other words, within the range of consciousness, there is unconsciousness and perception, and what is transformed from the range of unconsciousness into the range of perception may be the so-called unconscious drawing in art.”

Because the artist had always worked alone, this was her first time working in a way in which she meets someone and together, listen to stories. The artist herself had been skeptical of working with this approach, but it seems that during her regular meeting with these elders, the artist experienced an assimilation of emotion: crying and laughing at their stories.

At the end of the project, there was a situation where one of the demented elderly women could no longer come to the dementia center because her husband who had late-stage lung cancer, and who always brought her to the center eventually passed away.  This demented old woman could not feel any pain and the artist was sad. This woman’s drawing, therefore, looks lonesome, vulnerable, and innocent.


Park Kyung Ryul, Vulnerable Drawing No.650 - One-Dimensional Responses to the Future, Grandmother, and Complexity, 2013, Oil, coloured pencil, oil pastel, and acrylic on terra paper, 240 x 650 cm © Park Kyung Ryul

In the drawings, we are able to see their lucid memories inside their unconsciousness along with the fabricated stories, coming together at some point and becoming tangled-up. The artist, drawn into their field of unconsciousness, could not completely shake off what seemed to have been shared emotions of their brilliant and ruthful pasts.

Thus, an unexpected empathy occurred, and due to it, their stories are once again reproduced as a story that the artist tells, seasoned with emotional lines in each of the massive drawings. The artist’s previous paintings are characterized by their solid images, dense compositions, intense colors, and the sense that it was completely assembled.

It was like an assembly of multiple, and distinctly completed images, pulled out her own memory, washed and polished to be revealed in the world. The drawings that were made for this exhibition, on the other hand, excluded the process of fabrication as much as possible. It seems as though she is trying to maintain the rawness of the emotions and stories of the elders. 

At the same time, her drawings are also trying to maintain the images formed from the emotion itself. To accompany these drawings, the artist made up a short story. This can be read with my figure which is being reflected on a mirror, and this story is a new story created by combining mostly the elders’ ridiculous story-like expressions and the artist’s imagination.
 
Now, on the eve of the exhibition, the artist says that oddly she does not experience impatience nor anxiety right before exhibitions. She says that she even feels a sense of stability to the extent that it is worrisome. And above all, she says that she thinks she has matured.

This gives me great comfort. I hope that those who see this exhibition can also be consoled. Also, I send my gratitude to the artist who, in this exhibition wrapping up 2013, allowed me to reflect on myself from the past up to today, putting aside the eyes heading towards the future.

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