Impure sacred

When I first encountered the works of Park Wunggyu, I prematurely dismissed them, thinking, “This just isn’t for me—it’s not within my realm of interest.” They felt overly religious, yet blasphemous; too explicit, yet obscure. My habitual tendency to categorize things—me versus you, sameness versus difference—was fully at play. Simply put, I was caught in a web of bias and preconception. So I reminded myself to wait. Artists and their works must be experienced directly; it’s in that encounter that unexpected stories emerge from the collision of spatial and temporal coordinates.

To roughly summarize Park’s ongoing interests: religious relics and iconography, sexual organs and phlegm, and animated faces. Seemingly disjointed, yet somehow connected. A sacred relic appears like a sexual organ; a Catholic icon resembles a shamanic talisman. Phlegm, a bodily secretion, is expelled like a sacred Buddhist sarira. The cartoonish faces—genderless, monstrous, alien—morph into unknown beings, sometimes biological, sometimes not. His work is simple yet complex, filthy yet sacred. Figurative yet abstract, Western in form yet deeply rooted in East Asian traditions—both ink painting and colored illustration. Who would paint something as vile as phlegm with such care? Why are holy relics and sexual imagery brought into such intimate proximity? These are the kinds of questions his work elicits. It unsettles the mind.

But meeting the artist in person turned out to be a complete reversal. With a pale face, short-cropped hair, and a long, cape-like coat, he spoke softly—almost like an ascetic monk. It was hard to imagine that such sacrilegious, grotesque, and provocative work came from someone so gentle. Listening to him and reading his artist notes, I realized there was something that possessed him: religion. Since childhood, he had been surrounded by Catholic relics and iconography at home. For him, the images of Jesus and Mary were not only steeped in sorrow and tragedy but were also mass-produced, grotesque, kitschy objects. He wanted to escape the rituals and customs that oppressed him. He wanted to resist. And yet, this religious atmosphere lingered and was reborn in his work.

Another major fixation was the body—particularly the sexual organs, long deemed taboo and unspeakable. Shockingly, those sacred relics often resembled genitals, appearing hermaphroditic or even depicting intercourse. Strangely, it didn’t feel real. It felt like something surreal, ancient, alien yet familiar. Both biological and artificial, both natural and man-made. The spherical forms he uses to represent expelled phlegm resemble intricately carved Chinese ivory balls perched on pedestals—but they’re actually inspired by plastic Dragon Ball figurines. Dirty, yet dignified; traditional, yet contemporary.

This fascination with the body eventually extends to the face. His face series is animation-inspired. Big round eyes—two, three, sometimes more—leak fluids or erupt in pustules. Insects, octopus tentacles, and hair engulf the face. They should be repulsive, yet they’re somehow… cute. These contradictions coexist in his work and generate another reversal when experienced in person. What looked raw or grotesque in photographs was astonishingly delicate and serene in real life. Regardless of whether he’s depicting a phallus, phlegm, or a monster, each dot and line was alive—crafted with precision and devotion. What looked like Western painting was, in fact, an intricate ink and pigment work on traditional Korean jangji paper. At that moment, a fissure opened between form and content. His materials and methods were completely detached from the shocking themes he dealt with. There was a gap between what the artist wanted to say and what he showed. He wanted to resist, but he was continuing tradition. The forms were obscene, but the expression was sacred. And yet, this contradiction was not negative. In fact, it was the surprise of this dissonance that moved me.

Until now, what was considered “impure” in our culture had to be depicted as dirty. Sacred things were not to be profaned. The grotesque had to look grotesque. But must it be that way? The moment we ask this question is the moment resistance begins—where reinvention becomes possible. This is where we start to reconsider binary oppositions: pure and impure, love and hatred, sacred and secular, cosmos and chaos, close and distant, secure and dangerous. Cleanliness meant order, dirt meant chaos. We kept close what we loved and distanced ourselves from what we hated. The sacred was safe; the profane, dangerous. These binaries used to stand opposed—but now they have been inverted, crossed, and blended. Perhaps they were never separate to begin with. After all, Jesus—the son of God—was born in a filthy manger, lower than the animals, and died nailed to the most reviled instrument of death, the cross. The Virgin Mary, though immaculately conceived, was rejected under the world’s impure gaze. This is how things have always been. Precious jade bears blemishes. Inside each of us resides not only saints and Madonnas, but monsters and animals, too.

In fact, Park Wunggyu’s work is not unfamiliar within Western art history. If one were to situate it within contemporary practice, it would fit in many currents. Art has long engaged with religion and the primal issues of life and death. Many artists have reexamined Christianity or resisted it. Art has resisted the values of disgust and distinction. It has explored amorphous forms. It has focused on sex and the body. It has embraced transformation and metamorphosis. Even Andy Warhol—arguably the most secular artist in art history—was the child of Slovakian immigrants and a devoted member of the Byzantine Catholic Church. His mother was deeply religious, and Warhol himself wrestled with faith. His religious interests appear directly in his portraits of Mary and Jesus, and in his ‘Last Supper’ series. His works on death and salvation show that he never truly escaped religious subject matter.

Since the 1980s, many Young British Artists (yBAs) have addressed these very themes. Chris Ofili shocked the world with his “blasphemous” portrayal of the Virgin Mary using black skin, elephant dung, and sexual imagery. Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin, and the Chapman Brothers explored preservation and decay, disfigured bodies, exposed organs and fluids, and raw depictions of love and sex. Many other contemporary artists invite us to pay attention not to the “bright, clean, normal” aspects of human nature, but to its “dark, dirty, abnormal” sides. Gilbert and George, Kiki Smith, Paul McCarthy, and Robert Gober have all shown fragmented, deformed, leaking bodies—feces, blood, saliva, genitals—capturing the horror and anxiety those liquids trigger in us. Their work breaks cultural taboos and aims for free expression of human complexity.

Whether one likes these tendencies or not, this current in contemporary art persists and evolves. Park Wunggyu’s work can be rediscovered within this context. But whereas many Western artists address religious anxiety and bodily disgust through confrontation and provocation, Park approaches us with surprising gentleness. He doesn’t preach or demand we change. He simply reveals what possesses him. Curiously, he doesn’t paint what he loves—he paints what he most wants to forget. What he most hates. The Virgin Mary. Cockroaches. He says that by rendering these in extreme detail, he eventually stops hating them. That he’s able to let go. It’s a courageous, head-on approach. Perhaps through artistic practice, Park has come to understand how love and hatred, attachment and renunciation operate in our world. Maybe these opposing binaries are desperate attempts to deal with the self and the Other. For within me resides the Other. Within me is a monster. Within me is the vulgar, the repulsive, the dirty. Perhaps I am those things. Or maybe the very act of distinction is futile.

It may be time to rethink how we deal with such differences—not by discriminating, isolating, and othering them, but by embracing them. The message Park Wunggyu whispers to us is not to conquer or assimilate the problematic Other, but to acknowledge and coexist with it. If the boundary persists, we need not erase it—but allow it to tremble and shift.

Let us once more set aside our prejudices and listen closely to the message he conveys through his work.

References

• 스페이스 니트 (Space Kneet)