Park Meena, 12 Colors Drawings II, 2013, Colored pencil on coloring page, 34.5 x 26.5 cm each (framed) © Park Meena

Park Meena’s exhibition is largely composed of three types of works: pencil drawings, abstract oil paintings, and works focusing on oil paint itself.
 
Upon entering the first-floor gallery, drawing works are installed on the left. These are connected to her coloring-book series. In the series Drawings, consisting of fifty drawings, the motif of the “sun” appears consistently. Park Meena collected individual pages from educational coloring books depicting the sun (the shape of the sun differs slightly since they were gathered from various countries) and filled in all areas except the sun with pencil. (She used a variety of pencils produced by different art material companies.)

In doing so, the artist determined the texture of the pencil strokes by considering the forms drawn on the paper as well as the stories implied within those forms. The works Greys, in which the moon appears, and 12 Colors Drawings, in which stars stand out, follow a similar context.
 
In the inner gallery on the first floor, a total of twenty-two paintings ranging from size 0 to size 200 are installed. The title is Figure. Although all the canvases are portrait formats, there are no concrete figurative images on the surface. Park Meena abstractly expresses memories and emotions related to people she has encountered. In order to capture subtly different emotions associated with each person, she recalled adjectives describing those emotions and visualized them through various techniques of oil painting. As diverse as her emotions were, the expressive techniques used are also highly varied.
 
Installed on the second floor, 12 Colors focuses on oil paint. The artist collected eleven sets of twelve-color oil paints distributed in Korea and applied each paint directly onto the canvas. Although each company selects twelve basic colors, the resulting colors vary greatly from product to product.
 
In this way, Park Meena deals with the fundamental tools and materials related to art—paint, (colored) pencils, canvases, and instructional manuals. In fact, these are such basic elements of making paintings, and things we encounter so easily, that we may not have paid much attention to them. Although they seem so fundamental that they would always remain the same, they change easily depending on time and place. When we examine the reasons behind these changes, the ways of thinking and conventions of people are revealed as they are.
 
Finally, what did Park Meena collect through this exhibition? What immediately catches the eye are oil paints, (colored) pencils, coloring-book manuals, and canvases of various sizes. What else did she collect? She also collected expressive techniques of oil painting and pencil drawing, various forms of suns, moons, and stars, and the stories embedded within them. If there is something more that was collected, perhaps the number twelve as well. Emotions toward people. And the ways people think.

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