Installation view of 《Angle Tail》 (Everyart, 2022) © Park Seok Min

If you close your eyes, you can see the black universe. Senses leave behind a long tail in the dark devoid of stars. The resonance of painting, or what lies beyond the gaze in fact takes place in the universe within the body, only visible when eyes are closed.

At the first moment of looking, Park’s pictorial phenomenon is more like an experience of a place than a surface. After looking at the surfaces filling the wall from far away, the viewer takes a step closer. They look at the surface of the painting. They then move away, in pursuit of the gaze that glides horizontally and digs vertically. The body explores space by groping the boundary between a surface and another.

This means to go through the phenomenon of painting a body that’s larger than the eyes. Park focuses on the emotional movement mediated by painting. It is an attempt to talk about things that are invisible through a visible medium, and to project a breath of life into a stationary object. I conjure up a world where we co-exist with painting. In the flow of air and time, static objects come alive every moment they are sensed.


| Beyond the gaze

The act of looking at painting is sometimes auditory, sometimes olfactory, and quite tactile. Today, art with material properties seem to tap us on our skin even more. It may be a resonance in between beings in the same world, and the touch of emotions permeated in the living body.

Brian Massumi, a contemporary philosopher and theorist, asserted that all practice of abstraction operates with not only visual but comprehensive senses, and that the serial experiences of such senses revive the abstract power of life.[1]

Painting has always been an attempt to transfer the experiences of the vibrant world onto the static object of the canvas. The emotion left behind on the canvas by the painter seeps, differently each time, underneath the skin of the one who views the work.

Park uses painting as a language to question the act of looking at everyday life. It’s an attempt to expand the way of viewing to a sense beyond vision. A world that doesn't seem to have too much to see amidst everyday life is often forgotten. The transparent beings in the emptiness of visions at times become an apparition, even their own presence.

The large presence of the celestial bodies in the sky is reduced to a small flicker as soon as it is witnessed by the eyes. The black emptiness of things that are invisible degenerates into a surface that just emits a group of stars. The task of the artist is given when they hold a brush over this emptiness. Things that are not visible are sometimes still there.


| The surface that pushes away reality

‘Mining Depth’(2022) series shows the gradual movement of light from core to periphery or from corner to center. Many canvases of different sizes reconstruct the walls of reality in a planned but illogical structure, like the fragmented drawing of a peculiar designer. The waves of color spread in various amplitudes in each of the canvases. Clear reverberations push the paint in a circular way.

The meditative resonance is blocked by a thin line of the present as soon as it encounters another wavelength. At every boundary where the waves meet, the world outside the canvas condenses into a horizon. The reality follows the boundaries in between the canvases, until it falls down a vertical cliff or slips and vanishes away in gentle arcs.

The absence of the corner, emptied in an arc, is like a lost spot in the field of vision. At the edges of the retina, the visual world suddenly disappears. Filling the unknown darkness primarily comes from an intuition derived from experience. The intuition of predicting the square corners of the canvas to lie outside of the field of view is rejected as soon as one confronts the indifferent emptiness in the rounded corners.

How can one imagine things that are not visible at first? That would be like imagining an unknown being as one looks at the fog far away over the water surface. The tail that one left behind out of steadiness shake like a blur. The silent shaking becomes a figure, a cloud, and soon an abstract form not resembling anything. Like the emptiness of a rounded corner, the mysterious tail slips when it’s attempted to be caught and vanishes when attempted to be seen.


| The expanding space-time around the gaze

The intimately leaning echoes become an event that only belongs to one world. The sentiment mediated by the painting are caused by the sense operated by the overall image of the painting. The experience of facing a static being as a body brimming with life carefully awakens the inner world. The images of diverse scales in the ‘Mining Depth’ series combine with each other to form a macroscopic structure.

One would have to move their body and adjust the width of their view in order to examine the microscopic world of each canvas. The surface of the painting becomes far away or nears as if to reach, depending on the way of seeing.

Sometimes traces of thick layer of oil paint can be found mainly in the middle of the acrylic paint. The heavy sense of texture, elaborately placed along the outline, stimulates the sense of touch and forms a staircase of gaze which descends vertically. There is a stark contrast between the methodology in which the small canvas series ‘Spectrology’ (2022) is installed on the wall and that of Mining Depth.

Each painting is arranged on the wall as independent units. The waves of diverse colors and lights protect themselves with their own blank(space) and form a large cluster. A series of works interfere with the horizontal path of the view, while also attempting at making variations in vertical depth.

The viewer’s emotions are aroused, and the body responds. The space of painting, which unfolds in horizontal and vertical directions, finally expands to dimensions beyond the plane surface.


| Angel Tail: The elusive beings

Among ambiguous scenes like an early morning fog, clear square color surfaces appear at times. For Park, this blank is something “unintelligible,” yet is also an “attempt to sense.”[2] The clear outline that cuts across the inside and outside is like reason interrupting emotions, or reality trespassing a dream. It’s both a covered stain as well as an exposed absence. Everything unknown is projected on an unfamiliar void.

The path of the wavelength becomes a secret within the outline. One must grab the tails of the echoes, or the angel’s tails that deviate in spiral and return like a repeat sign. It is about trying to keep the time of the present moment that slips through one’s fingers, and to keep in the painting the current events, which are vigorous only in abstraction. The present is like a ghost, so it is only seen as a trace of the past. It is a trace of the past that has passed, as well as a blank space awaiting the future.

After completing the sketch with a brush, Park colors it with airbrush. It is a suitable medium which removes the element of the intervention of the hands, and combines paint, air, and gravity. It reaches the skin in the present moment, thick and saturated when standing closer, and light and vast when distant. The particles of paint contain the air of the present and settle in their respective positions.

The grains of different colors that contain their own sense of the present create their own universe, inhaling quietly and exhaling delicately. The traces of the brush that laid the foundation contain the color of an actual place. However, as the work progresses, the image in the memory becomes blurred by the coincidence of the present.

The trajectory of the dearest time embroiders the surface of the Angel Tail (2022) series. Each image captures the speed of moving light, the weight of falling meteors, and the brilliant and distant sense of flashes and void.

Looking involves internalizing the world inside and outside the field of vision with an invisible sense. The surface of the painting then transfers it to something material that can be grasped by hand, and colors that are visible to the eye. Things that are not visible sometimes become even more visible, just like the tails of a meteor caused by optical illusion can evoke one’s imagination of the hidden essence of a landscape.

The gaze is fixed on the form of the present that slips, leaving the gap of the view that has left. With a larger sense, one takes steps on the invisible layers of the surface.


[1]Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Translated by Jeong Yoo-kyoung (Seoul: Galmuri Publisher, 2016), pp. 104-107.
[2]Park Seok-min, artist note, 2022.

References