Installation view of 《Teal Greenhouse》 (WWNN, 2024) © Park Seok Min

Clues, of Certain (In)transparent Movements

Text: Lim Sooyoung(Independent Curator, Art Historian)

Before “teal” came to mean a bluish-green color, it was the name of a bird. Around the eyes of the Eurasian teal, a winter migratory bird, is a bluish-green marking that looks as if it had been softly painted on with a brush. This mysterious color, revealed among brown feathers that go surprisingly well with bare winter branches, began to be called “teal” in the early twentieth century, after the name of the bird.

Another color appears in the title of Park Seok Min’s exhibition 《Teal Greenhouse》. It is green, a color belonging to the same family as teal. A “greenhouse” is an architectural structure that cultivates plants(green) by artificially regulating light, temperature, humidity, and other conditions, thereby controlling the environment.

It is a place where greenness is maintained regardless of the changing seasons, separated from the outside both spatially and temporally. The artist focuses on the way the structure and concept of the greenhouse become motifs for “asteroids, domes, apartments, islands, and other settings that appear in various groups of science fiction novels dealing with the post-apocalypse from the 1970s to the present,” and on the way they are defined as “closed-loop ecosystems.”

This is because these sites carry an ambivalent symbolism as humanity’s final refuge and as incubators from which a new future may be rebuilt. Set against the backdrop of future technologies, they are compartmentalized spaces that reveal “primitive contradictions” and make possible more complex discussions of time and space.

In this exhibition, which takes the closed-loop ecosystem in speculative narratives as its motif, WWNN functions not only as an exhibition space but also as a kind of virtual greenhouse, operating to sustain the vitality of the paintings transplanted into it. Here, the transparent glass window, which visually connects the interior and exterior of the building while spatially separating them, becomes an important clue for understanding a series of works that deal with contact points between inside and outside, here and there, the present and the future.

The images the artist realizes on panels of various forms, from circles with their lower parts cut off to ovals, rectangles, and irregular shapes, call to mind the infinitely expanding universe beyond the transparent protective membrane of the greenhouse, while also evoking an artificial ecosystem being controlled within that membrane. In other words, the surface of the panel is also a provisional boundary where the external and internal worlds meet.

The scenes we partially witness along this heightened boundary share the quality of being fleeting moments and temporary phenomena produced by dust clouds, scattered light, and mist. Scenes of bluish dawn and dusky twilight, realized through variations of teal, are dramatic and even majestic because they have just come into being and yet will soon disappear.

However, the artist does not necessarily mourn the extinction of humanity or romantically dream of survival after the end. Instead, while maintaining ambiguity, he concentrates on the uncertainty of the external world and future that lie against the boundary.

For example, in Teal Greenhouse(fossil), encountered at the entrance on the first floor, the three objects placed at the center of the picture plane seem like the teeth of a giant animal, or like gravestones precariously supporting one another. The uncertainty of the objects captured in the image is emphasized again in Terrarium 01, which could be a germinating seed or a mineral meteorite, and in the clouds of Terrarium 03 and Temple Dawn 02, which at first glance resemble the form of a pigeon or the fluttering wings of a swarm of butterflies.

Are they traces of ruin? Or clues announcing the birth of new life? Are they enemies that have appeared to attack us? Or companions who have appeared in solidarity? Could they perhaps be saviors?

What attitude should we take before objects whose intention, meaning, and identity we cannot precisely know? Should we try to communicate with them in some way? Or should we hide beneath the protective membrane of the greenhouse and withdraw? Park Seok Min, who has explored the possibilities and impossibilities of painting from multiple angles through the event of exhibition, does not direct these proliferating questions only to the viewer.

He also attaches question marks to the works themselves, asking where the limits of painting as a medium lie, and how a still fictional image can reveal temporality and spatiality. As one concrete method, he applies to his work recently and dramatically developed immaterial modes of image production, using generative artificial intelligence, big data, software, and other tools.

At the same time, in order to express these materially, he introduces materials not found in his previous work. By applying gel, cement, minerals, and clay onto smooth canvas surfaces, crushing and spreading them, and then spraying paint over them, the artist disrupts the “texture built up from within” the painting with painterly “gesture.” In doing so, he attempts to redefine the concept of the medium, moving away from flat images lacking temporality toward something in which time has accumulated.

Installation view of 《Teal Greenhouse》 (WWNN, 2024) © Park Seok Min

2.
On a single surface, writings of different perspectives and flows coexist. This resembles Park Seok Min’s methodology, which deals with the inside and outside embraced by a boundary, with controlled reality and uncertain future. From now on, let us withdraw the gaze directed at the works and view the exhibition through imagination. Let us suppose we are looking down at the gallery building on a satellite map. Gradually, as if scrolling downward and zooming out, let us widen the distance.

As mentioned earlier, if 《Teal Greenhouse》 is both an exhibition and a virtual greenhouse, through “map view” we witness from the observer’s perspective the ecosystem being controlled and cultivated within this space. Then what is it that sustains life inside the greenhouse? It is none other than painting. In fact, Park Seok Min has confessed that his works gradually seem to acquire their own vitality and proliferate.

Moving away from a one-way relationship in which the artist as subject conceives and completes painting as object, he observes, manages, protects, experiments with, and responds to painting as a living organism that repeats mutation and proliferation in order to survive.

Through “map view,” we come to recognize that the exhibition cultivating painting is also growing inside infinitely amplified greenhouses extending to the city, nation, region, planet, and eventually to a black hole that will one day drive all these boundaries into a state of extinction.

As a result, Park Seok Min’s work does not seek consistency, formal unity, or a development-oriented structure. He simply shares with viewers, at each moment, the process through which painting mutates.

Likewise, the new works shown in 《Teal Greenhouse》 seem to partially refer to 《Vortex 8》(2023), which dealt with cosmic phenomena, 《Lagrange Point》(2022), which took science fiction novels as its motif, or 《Angel Tail》(2022), which explored temporality and spatiality, yet they are not placed as straightforward continuations of those earlier exhibitions.

Rather, the new works, which sculpt wooden panels into irregular forms and place emphasis on spatiality, resonate with the visual experiments he attempted in his early practice.

In this sense, the exhibition also connects to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the constellation. He wrote that, “as what has been flashes up together with the present to form a constellation,” works of art are integrated and formed through discontinuous relationships. 《Teal Greenhouse》 proposes that viewers imagine the form of a constellation made by the large and small flashes of the past, present, and future works that build Park Seok Min’s artistic world.

References