Gaze following waves of color and light… ask about looking [박미란의 속닥이는 그림들]
Article entered 2024-03-01 21:00:00
Article modified 2024-03-01 19:45:20
Park Seok-min, a painting that imagines the outside of looking
Variation of gaze between horizontal and vertical
Look into the distance, take a step closer and explore
Depending on how you look at it, it seems like it’s going far away or it’s going to reach you
Macroscopic structure created by combining various screens
A sense of expansion into dimensions beyond the plane
Airbrush coloring after sketching with a brush
Clear color field in fog-like ambiguity
“An attempt to sense what cannot be understood”
◆Things beyond sight
When I close my eyes, I see a black universe. In the darkness without a single star, my senses stretch their long tails. The resonance that painting gives and the events that occur after looking actually occur within the universe of the body that can only be seen with one’s eyes closed.
At the moment of first viewing, Park Seok-min’s (42) pictorial event is closer to an experience of a place than a picture. He looks at the screens that fill the wall from afar and then takes a step closer. Look at the screen with your eyes. We move horizontally and follow the gaze that penetrates vertically. The body explores space by tracing the boundaries between screens. It is about experiencing the events of a painting with a body larger than your eyes. Seokmin Park focuses on the emotional movement mediated by painting. It is an attempt to talk about invisible events through visible media and project breathing life onto a stationary object. I think about the world in which we and paintings live together. In the flowing air and time, static objects become alive every moment they are sensed.
Looking at a painting is sometimes auditory, often olfactory, and quite tactile. It may be a resonance between beings who stay in the same world and a feeling of emotion in a living body. Brian Massumi, a contemporary media theorist, said that all abstract practices operate not only on vision but also on the overall senses, and that what the continuous experience evokes is the abstract power of life. Painting has always been an attempt to transfer the experience of the living world onto the canvas, a static object. The emotions that the artist entrusts to the screen seep under the viewer’s skin in a different way every time.
Park Seok-min uses painting as a language to ask questions about how we view everyday life. It is an attempt to expand the way of seeing beyond sight to include the senses. There is so much to see every day that the invisible world is often forgotten. Transparent beings in the visual void sometimes even the fact of their existence becomes a ghost. The great presence of a celestial body in the sky is reduced to a small flicker the moment it is witnessed by the eye. The black space of invisible things is reduced to nothing more than a screen that transmits a bunch of starlight. The painter’s task is given when he picks up his brush right on the blank space. Things you can’t see are sometimes still there.
‘Mining Depth’ (2022). Provided by Park Seok-min
◆A screen that pushes away reality
The ‘Mining Depth’ (2022) series shows the gradual movement of light from the center to the periphery, or from the corners to the center. Numerous large and small canvases reconstruct the wall surface of reality in a planned but non-logical structure, like the fragmented drawings of an eccentric designer. In individual screens, color waves develop at various amplitudes. A transparent echo pushes the paint in a circular motion. The moment that meditative sound encounters another wave, it is blocked by the thin line of the present. At each boundary where waves meet, the world outside the screen is condensed into a horizon. Reality follows the border between screens and either falls down a vertical cliff or disappears by sliding in a gentle arc.
The absence of rounded corners is like a lost empty space in the field of vision. At the edge of the retina, the visual world suddenly disappears. What fills in the darkness of the unknown is mainly intuition that comes from experience. The intuition that predicts the square corner of the canvas outside the field of view is denied the moment one encounters the indifferent fan-shaped blank space. How can we imagine things that cannot be seen in the first place? It is about looking at the haze far away on the surface of the water and imagining an unknown existence. The tail I left behind before I could control it was shaking like fog. The silent shaking becomes a person, a cloud, and soon an abstraction that resembles nothing. The mysterious tail is like a fan-shaped void; if you try to catch it, it slips away, and if you try to look at it, it disappears.
◆The world expands around the gaze
Echoes leaning closely together become events belonging to only one world. The emotions mediated by painting are created by the senses activated by the overall picture. The experience of encountering a stationary being as a living body carefully awakens the inner world. In the ‘Mining Depths’ series, screens of various scales combine to form a macroscopic structure. If you want to observe the microscopic world of an individual canvas, you must move your body to adjust the width of your field of view. Depending on the way you look, the painting’s screen appears far away or close enough to touch.
Traces of thick oil paint can sometimes be seen in the middle of the acrylic paint casting screen. The heavy texture elaborately placed along the outline stimulates the tactile sense and at the same time forms a staircase of gaze descending in the vertical direction. The way the small canvas series ‘Spectrology’ (2022) was installed on the wall contrasts with that of ‘Mining Depths.’ Each screen is listed on the wall as an independent entity. The waves of various colors and light protect themselves with their own margins and form a large group. A series of works interfere with the horizontal path of the gaze while also attempting variations in vertical depth. The viewer’s emotions respond and the body reacts. The world of painting, which unfolds in horizontal and vertical directions, finally expands to a dimension beyond the flat surface.
‘Angel Tail’ (2022). Provided by Park Seok-min
◆Angel’s Tail: Beings that cannot be caught
A clear rectangular color field often appears in scenes as vague as dawn fog. To Park Seok-min, the blank space is “something that cannot be understood,” and yet it is “an attempt to sense.” The clear outline that separates the inside and the outside is like reason interfering with emotions, or reality invading a dream. It is a covered stain and an open member at the same time. I project all the unknown things onto an unfamiliar blank space. Inside the contour, the path of the wave becomes secret. We must hold on to the endless tails of echoes, the tails of angels that deviate in a spiral and return like a round and round sign. It is about making the present time, which is scattered between the fingers, and the current events that are only abstractly vivid, stay in the painting. The present is like a ghost and can only be seen as a trace of the past. It is a trace of the past and an empty space waiting for the future.
Seokmin Park completes the sketch with a brush and then colors it with an airbrush. It is an appropriate tool for reducing the involvement of the hand and mixing paint, air, and gravity. If you get closer, you can touch the current skin thickly and densely, and if you step back, you can touch the current skin in a light and expansive way. The particles of paint capture the air of today and settle on each spot. Colored particles swallowing different present times create their own universe with quiet inhalation and delicate exhalation. The traces of the brush that laid the foundation retain the colors of an actual place, but as the work progresses, the images in memory become blurred and obscured by the contingencies of the present. The path of time, as sorrowful as a haze, embroiders the screen of the ‘Angel Tail’ (2022) series. What each screen contains is the speed of light moving forward, the weight of a falling meteor, and the brilliant and distant sensation of flash and void.
Looking is the act of digesting the world inside and outside the field of vision with invisible senses. The painting screen once again translates this into tangible properties and visible colors. Like imagining the hidden essence of the landscape from the tail of a shooting star created by optical illusion, invisible things sometimes become something more visible. I just stare at the shape of the present that is slipping away, emptying the space of perspective that has left. With a greater sense, I step onto the stairs of the invisible screen.
Miran Park, Curator, Art Theory and Criticism
