Exploring the ideal space at the boundary of zero

Among Korean curators and critics, Park's reputation is based on an unequivocal trust that he never disappoints them, that he will never let them down. <Move (1996), Volume (1997), Come to Nothing (1998), Level (2002), Deep (2003), Hot Place (2004), and Diminish (2005), <Ruin (2006), Light Weight (2006), Vacuum (2008), Friction (2008), Floating (2009), and Air Wall (2009-2010), <Ruin (2009), Boomerang (2009), Scenery (2010), Dim (2010), Fence (2011), Fall (2011), and X (2013), <Bone (2013), Flash Wall (2014), Garden, Width Series (2014), and just look at the titles of the works he has presented so far. Just by kneading these words one after the other, the five senses - sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch - open up, creating the illusion of responding to something. The sensations of movement, floating, volume and depth, horizontal and vertical, hot and cold, faint and clear, light and heavy, soft and hard, etc. seem to whisper to people to feel what it really is. Park has become one of Korea's leading artists by successfully realizing these very difficult-to-image subjects, which no other artist has attempted, with his own way of using materials and organizing space. Moreover, the materials he uses are nothing special, just ordinary industrial raw materials such as wire, transparent plastic, air tubes, Styrofoam, plastic mirrors, ink-stained veneer, and sheet paper brushed with oil colors, or materials that the artist has added a little touch to. The unpredictability of how these materials will emerge from his sensory field, and the spatiality with which they will be realized, amplifies the anticipation of Park's ongoing work.


Artist of the Year Exhibition and Kiwon Park

The Artist of the Year exhibition, which began in 1995 and continues to this day, has been an important part of the Korean art scene for many reasons. In 2012, the program was replaced by an international juried competition, but until then, the curators of the MMCA had been selecting one artist a year through free discussion and organizing an exhibition that focused on his or her work. Because of the symbolism of selecting only one artist (or, in some years, two artists at the same time) and granting the title of "Artist of the Year," the exhibition has always attracted a great deal of attention from the art world. Park Ki-won was the last artist to be selected by the government, and in fact, the last artist to be selected by the curators of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art themselves, becoming the 2010 Artist of the Year. In Artist of the Year 2010, which was the most widely publicized exhibition of his artistic potential and achievements, Park composed three works, Dim, Background, and Air Wall, which occupied a huge space of about 1,800 square meters in the museum's Second Exhibition Hall and Central Hall. The exhibition, which was praised for revealing the essence of Park's art by uniting large-scale installations in a single location and their connections, also attracted popularity as the active intervention of visitors became an important element of the work. First, Park unwound about two tons of his favorite 0.2 mm thin wire and installed two large chunks of wire in the exhibition. The strange objects, whose outlines were blurred by the dim lighting, were placed in the exhibition as the titular 'faint' entity. Some said it looked like a bush, others like a giant clump of hair. Still others found it frightening, like an unidentifiable monster. The artist said that he wanted to create the feeling of walking through a foggy space at dawn. In the concourse, which is flooded with natural light in contrast to the dark atmosphere of the exhibition hall, the artist cut sheets of paper the same size as the granite tiles that finish the interior walls of the concourse, painted each sheet like blue marble, and attached them to the wall, which he named Background. Some people thought it was a fantasy palace, like something they'd seen in a dream, and they sang and danced around it. Others refused to enter the space, thinking it was a mirage and that they would be annihilated if they did. An air wall was installed between the two spaces that was both a 'wall' and a 'non-wall'. The Air Wall, a 1,000-by-800-by-350-meter transparent cuboidal cushion, stacked one on top of the other, is in a sense a symbol of Park's artistic direction.


'I thought of exhibiting with minimal changes to the venue (the exhibition center). I wanted to keep the bright, spacious, cool and deep look of the exhibition hall as it is.
I thought of an exhibition where there are transparent works in the show, and there are people in the show. Air in the air, air in motion,
It shows the "movement of air". I experienced it as a return to the most fundamental and archetypal point of zero psychologically.
The basic concept of the exhibition is to show a space that can be done and felt, that is, to lead the viewer into the inner world of the vacuum. I place
It is an exhibition that maintains a coexistence between people and the artwork. It is a "harmonious balance" between the artwork, the audience, and the place.
is the "ideal space."" (Note 1)


His use of transparent materials stems from his intention to perceive space as space without any preconceived notions, and he believes that revealing the characteristics of space with minimal intervention is the way to find the ideal balance between place, people, and artwork. This attitude has impressed critics and art historians who have seen or experienced his exhibitions. Youngjoon Lee referred to Park's sculptural experiments in recognizing objects as objects, even if they are again trapped in a network of derived meanings, as a "return of the real" in the words of Hal Foster, while Ji Eun Lee argued that Park's work awakens the viewer to the fact that communication as a social dimension is a new direction for art by providing a broader range and wavelength of experience. Highlighting the example of Ruin, a 2006 work that evokes a burnt house, Ko discussed the ambivalent dimensions of transparency and opacity, creation and destruction, reality and surreality, and the possibilities for interpretation that Park's work can offer.(Note 2)

Lee Kwan-hoon is the one who most succinctly described Park's work. He believes that 'place', 'space', 'margin', 'rest', and 'zero state' are the elements that Park Kiwon focuses on the most when working on a project or work.(Note 3) As mentioned in the artist's note above, 'zero state' is a way to induce people or even the artist himself into the inner world of the vacuum of objects, space, and the subject who perceives them, and the exhibition that maximized this awareness was . For Zero State, Park cleaned the exhibition space, replaced the interior of the space with new materials, and gave it the temporality and spatiality of space and rest. The artist talks.

"In the end, it's about the balance of place, work, and people, and trying to naturally derive from a zero point, a vacuum, like the boundary between reality and unreality."

The central hall of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art was transformed into a blue, slightly unrealistic marble. Park wanted people to experience a "new space" and explore it like wandering through a "labyrinth" to find the meaning of life, even if it was a bit confusing. He also wanted people to enter the exhibition hall with wire bushes and create an atmosphere where they could walk around or rest in the grass, reflecting on the "endless journey of life" in the process. <This year's exhibition gave Park the confidence that she could present metaphors about art and life through her choice of materials and interpretation of space. The title of the exhibition, "Who's Afraid of Museums?" was chosen as follows.


and <Drop

One of Park Ki-won's favorite phrases is "The hairs on my arms are moving...". When the wind blows, it stimulates the downy hairs on human skin. In a moment, people who were together in that time and space know. Even though nothing has happened, a fine flow of air envelops their bodies, reawakening their sense of being alive, and various thoughts about the world pass through their breath...The realm of sculpture that naturally maximizes the spectrum of the threshold of the least intensity of stimuli is the most wondrous and mysterious world of art that Park Ki-won shows us. Therefore, no matter what kind of space and environment Park Ki-won encounters, he does not forcefully change the space, consciously rush his sculptural interventions, or loudly talk about excessive thematic settings. Park values the space itself. Rather than creating a space for his works, he wants them to be neutral, a work within a space. He wants the environment or landscape to remain untouched, the slightest 'movement' to be revealed in his works, such as the slightest flow of air moving the hairs on his arm, or the unrecognizable figure of a passerby. As Park aims to 'see a slightly renewed place through a slightly different environment', we can see how even the most insignificant diagonal tape has been transformed into (Busan Museum of Art, 2013), a place of thought where people are reminded of what it means to be completely free in space, 2013), laugh at the humor of (Amorepacific Museum of Art, Osan, 2013), which adorns the exterior wall of a red brick building, and extract messages of communication and disconnection, division and unification from the meaningful but playful encounter between a wire wall and a cloth ball (Berlin Eastside Outdoor Exhibition Center, 2014).

Among Park's recent projects, (2007~2008) and (2011~2015) are the most eye-catching. At first glance, they appear to be two-dimensional works, but they are noteworthy because they show a deeper and more compressed dimension of Park's spatial experiments.

First of all, in Wideness, the artist perceives even a sheet of paper (214x150cm) as a space and divides it to visualize its volume. The layers of lines that are stacked on top of the divided surface further emphasize the artist's world, which gives spatiality to the flat work. Therefore, this series of paintings is not a type of color surface painting or monochromatic painting representative of Korea, even though it is connected by color in the series of 'green,' 'blue,' and 'brown,' which the artist refers to as the tones of nature. His paintings can be considered a type of minimalist art consisting of 20 series of extremely material works. The viewer first perceives one large colored surface, and then, as they look closely at the details, they can feel the 'space on a plane' through the feast of separated surfaces and lines stacked on top of each other. The individual works are connected to each other in space and only then do they become a complete work. In this sense, the work is a three-dimensional, layered work that conveys Park's ideas about time and space, which are also connected to the place, the viewer, and the work.

In the second work, Falling, the artist approaches the theme of exploring spatiality in the flat plane by exploring the auxiliary structures of "window" and "wall". In his notes for Falling, he writes, "I started with the idea that it would be nice to see a wide window, which is silent and still, as a more light and energetic wall. I plan to create a natural and mysterious moving wall that appears as an overlapping phenomenon of light transparent colored vinyl," he writes, adding that the word "fall" is indirectly reminiscent of a waterfall. The series, which also features LED lighting, demonstrates that Park's sculptural experiments have now reached the stage of activating the space. Like the kinetic energy of a steadily falling waterfall, Park's works have now formed a structure that acts as the circular energy of space.


Eunju Choi (Director, Gyeonggi-do Museum of Art)

(Note 1) February 24, 2009 Author's Note
(Note 2) Book
(Note 3) <2010 Writer of the Year: See Lee Kwan-hoon's review, "Park Ki-won Goes to the Museum to Get Some Air," written after seeing Park Ki-won Jeon.