Installation view of 《Dark Change》 © Space Willing N Dealing

《Dark Change》 is a two-person exhibition of painters Park Noh-wan and Hyundoo Jung, curated by Kim Jinju and presented at Space Willing N Dealing from Wednesday, November 13 to Sunday, December 8, 2024. The exhibition focuses on the intimate narratives each artist conveys as a painter and as a contemporary individual through their respective practices. It speaks to painting in an era marked by silence and darkness, and to the innocent value that a painter may still hold.
 
Since January 2024, the two artists have revisited their previous bodies of work, spending time together in conversations and writing—engaging their senses as if sharing a prolonged “blackout”—and reflecting these experiences in their new works. Park Noh-wan has maintained his method of mixing watercolor with gum arabic and applying it to canvas, weaving together fleeting everyday forms and virtual images of the present to render subtle cognitive shifts he personally perceives. Hyundoo Jung has continued to inscribe on canvas the abstract colors and lines that accumulate in paint as his body moves, capturing the sensory events that arise in the time of painting.
 
Last spring, the curator offered the phrase “My world has collapsed” to both artists, prompting them to imagine, in narrative form, what might unfold afterward. In this process, Park presented a bleak future and introduced a character suggesting unavoidable events awaiting humanity, unfolding his story through this figure. Jung, in contrast, proposed a different protagonist guiding the narrative and expanded another set of surreal moments distinct from Park’s. Based on these imagined scenarios, the two artists created new paintings grounded in their respective visions. Unlike before, Park’s canvases now blur the figure and attempt abstract expressions based on geometric forms, while Jung explores compositions in which concrete figures become more pronounced.
 
The exhibition title “Dark Change” refers to the theatrical technique of briefly blacking out the stage lighting in order to change set pieces or scenes. The act of imagining what comes after a collapsed world resembles the silence and darkness that contemporary painters inevitably confront during the time of painting. The painters’ ongoing labor and the evolving expression within their works involve repeatedly overturning and reassembling an already constructed world. Observing the numerous social and cultural expansions occurring around them, they continually imagine what position they might occupy within this landscape—an enduring task assigned to those who stand as painters in the present.
 
Like painters who are expected to declare something even when they have nothing in particular to declare, perhaps they simply require a space in which to continue—repeating words of innocence to themselves—moving through persistence and blackout, transition and yet another persistence. Through the movements that Park Noh-wan and Hyundoo Jung sustain as painters living today, the exhibition unfolds a small imagination of what might follow the collapse of their world.
(Text by Kim Jinju)

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