artworkkorea: Park, Byung choon : A Journey of Landscape: The Lay-Over

A Journey of Landscape: The Lay-Over

Written by Kho, Chung hwan (Art Critic)

Park Byung Choon refers to the theme of this exhibition as “landscape collection”. Considering the time he first visited Jeong Seon as the starting point of his landscape painting career, Park Byung Choon’s been at it for 20 years. The artist’s topics have focused on the modernization of Korean painting, and he has been experimenting with various meaningful trial and error processes throughout his career. And now we have the privilege of looking at the traces of this time. However, this doesn’t mean that we should think of it as a mainstream artists’ retrospective exhibition since Park’s experiment on the forms in Korean painting is an ongoing project. This will be confirmed again through this exhibition. Therefore, in this sense, the theme, “landscape collection” implies an interim examination on his experimentation with new possibilities in Korean painting. This exhibition combines aspects of all those experiments. Whether by intention or not, the featured series of new works are founded upon the aspects developed in earlier works, hinting that from the stepping stone of his long experience, another experiment may begin.

One thing we should notice in his recent works is how Park has started to use images captured from Google Earth. As we know Google Earth images are aerial photographs, and the viewpoint of these images can be somewhat similar to ‘Boogambup’ (bird’s eye view method) in Korean painting terms but when looking into details, they are, fundamentally different. Although the artist has applied a view from above in his paintings before, looking down from mountain tops, this is the first time for him to take a completely aerial view; something that would be basically impossible unless he used aerial images such as those provided by Google Earth. Since the perspective of these paintings take a directly downward aerial view, the flatness of the painting is maximized, this again illustrates a visual effect that stresses the flatness of the artist’s works.

Yet if the paintings made with Google Earth are enabling him to expand his viewpoint; he also is seeking to expand the space of the two dimensional paintings to that of installation work. Through various three dimensional objects, and a series of installation works Park has tested the possibility of exhibition space by including the space itself as one of the main components of the work can be a good example of this.

One installation work, for example, is his Plastic Bag Landscape. This is a work consisting of black plastic bags piled up in various sizes on the floor of the exhibition space, and it creates a great diversity in form and figure. Each figure is different from another. In this work, viewers can see real landscape-like components: a steep or gentle slope, various sizes of canyons, mountain peaks and cliffs. Sometimes the lighting creates an unexpected contrast between shiny areas and shadowed areas due to the reflective characteristic of plastic. In this way, sometimes it appears like a glossy coal mountain, creating surrealistic atmosphere. While Ramen Landscape gives soft, friendly and feminine feelings like those experienced when we look out at a peaceful prairie, Plastic Bag Landscape gives a rough, simple and masculine impression. Thus Park substituted ink and brush with these objects that share a sort of physical similarity with the scenery, and thereby expanded the possibility of his expression.

Finally, for the main part of this exhibition, Park produced an installation of the grand landscape that he saw and felt on his trips to the Himalayas. This is a site-specific work that uses the structures of exhibition space as it is, and in this way Park tries to unite the exhibition space with the exhibition display setting. To do this, he did a landscape painting with Chinese ink on the three tall walls that constructed U shape in the space where the first and second floors are connected. And then he installed white cloths from the ceiling to the ground, which are slightly separated from the walls, trying to make the form of waterfalls inside the gallery space. In addition to this, he placed a square shaped water tank on the floor of the space, put natural rocks in the tank and created the realistic representations of waterfalls. In the water tank, he placed an electronic motor, so that waves could circulate around the draped cloth.

By doing so, all the components of the grand scenery that he had experienced, from the waterfalls represented in white cloths hung from the ceiling, the water pool in the water tank, the waves on the surface of the water, the rocks represented in natural stone and the surrounding background represented in the painting on the walls, become a whole.

This is indeed a nature-like, man-made nature, an imitation of nature, nature in three dimensional objects. Yet the act of reproduction is not the most interesting to the artist here. It is rather the sensation and impression that the artist received by looking at nature. Through this, the artist offers an idea about landscape painting or the landscape that only exists in the realm of painting to the realm of reality, and as the result, the viewer can experience strange yet familiar landscapes in his work.

Park Byung Choon has been combining his two dimensional works with three dimensional objects or site-specific installations. In this way, he has been trying reinterpret the concept of landscape paintings by bringing two dimensional landscapes into three dimensional spaces. He also tried to create an experimental level that has more reality to it.