《YOU, Live!: Twelve-Door Handles》 marked artist Yoon Young Park’s first solo exhibition in nine years. Having worked between Korea and Canada, Park garnered significant attention in the Korean art world in the late 2000s for her distinctive storytelling methods and her expansion of the possibilities within the Korean painting medium.

《YOU, Live!》 is a theater-exhibition platform centered around a new scenario written by Park titled ‘Twelve-Door Handles’. The artist investigates and reconfigures contemporary events—such as the nuclear disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima and the UK’s military intervention in Libya—intertwining these with her own personal experiences. This open-ended scenario, structured as twelve overlapping timelines, unfolds like a mystery novel, leading the viewer to deduce the background or imminent situation behind each of the twelve door handles.

Narrated in the second person—beginning with “You”—the work places the audience in the role of protagonist. Script, sound, video, drawings, sculpture, and archival elements are interwoven to create a theatrical stage where the viewer's presence activates a spontaneous and accidental drama.

Meanwhile, the ‘Twelve-Door Handles’ scenario was reimagined by theater director Hyeongjin Lim as a post-dramatic play titled Your Supper, and also adapted into an essay by poet Bo-Seon Shim, offering the public a variety of interpretative formats.

/ Exhibition Halls 1 and 2, Ilmin Museum of Art

Park’s scenario Twelve-Door Handles originated from two photographs the artist encountered by chance. One is the widely known image of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, taken by a female photojournalist for Turkey’s Doğan News Agency in 2015. The other is a black-and-white photograph included in British artist Tacita Dean’s 2001 work The Russian Ending, titled ‘The Story of Mink the Whale’.

These images evoked in the artist a childhood memory of her young nephew repeatedly reaching for and tugging on door handles.

In the scenario, a young boy—appearing to be under five years old—converses with a blue-hued minke whale at the boundary between land and sea. Across twelve distinct worlds, the child and the whale appear in different forms and face each other in various ways, revealing how innocent protagonists of childhood imagination become entangled in the making of monumental events and histories.

The artist delves into grand narratives concerning the origins and potential end of human history by linking historical texts on Armageddon, as mentioned in the Book of Revelation, with contemporary global incidents and wars that continue to unfold around the world.

References

• 일민미술관 (Ilmin Museum of Art)