Jina Park,
Kitchen 01, 2022 ©Kukje
Gallery. Photo: Chunho AnKukje Gallery presents “Rocks, Smoke, and
Pianos”, a solo exhibition by Jina Park, through January 26, 2025, in the
gallery’s Seoul K2 and Hanok. In this exhibition, Park showcases approximately
40 new works using oil and watercolor that explore site-specific locations
including a museum exhibition hall, a restaurant kitchen, and a piano factory.
Here, she continues to use photography as
the basis of her painting practice, reconstructing scenes captured through her
camera. Since her Lomography series (2004 07), where Park
used a Lomo camera, Park has assigned herself the task of creating paintings
not bound by the subject, action, or event, but instead focusing on
transforming utterly quotidian moments into painterly subjects that occur in an
invisible dimension of space.
Jina Park,
Lighting in the Pink Room, 2023 ©Kukje Gallery. Photo: Chunho AnAll of the paintings featured in this exhibition illustrate interior spaces, each depicting figures immersed in their work with a sense of purpose. The exhibition title “Rocks, Smoke, and Pianos” refers to mundane objects that one might pass by without noticing, and is a synecdoche alluding to the different sites that the artist visited and recorded with her camera.
Jina Park,
Red Letters 03, 2023 ©Kukje Gallery. Photo: Chunho AnThis
exhibition is a journey in which Park traverses traditional boundaries that
exist between drawing and painting, figuration and abstraction, as well as
photography and painting. By inserting discordant gaps into what appears to be
a smooth surface of the painting, she seeks her own approach to the question,
“What is the pictoriality of painting?”
Naturalistic
style undergoes a series of transitions, summarized as the distortion from the
camera lens and the painterly experimentation of the artist, to return with a
completely new pictorial language and grammar. This enables the artist to
create works that thoroughly investigate and deliberately express the
pictoriality of painting. These fleeting moments, suspended in the present
continuous tense, come together in the exhibition space and invite reflection
on the true essence of painting.
Ji Yeon Lee has been working as an editor for the media art and culture channel AliceOn since 2021 and worked as an exhibition coordinator at samuso (now Space for Contemporary Art) from 2021 to 2023.
