Nature in Various
Transformations

Painter Park perceives nature through her sensory antennae, valves

Paintings by Park Young-in feel like illustrations of the natural scenery as perceived through her own senses. Her paintings are not just created through the retina, that is through her visual sense, but they are unfurled using tactile, auditory and olfactory senses as well, said art critic Park Young-taek, art criticism professor at Kyunggi University.
In a critique on painter Park's art pieces, the critic said the painter deviates from visual-centered arts practices. Her paintings give the impression that an active understanding and interpretation of the world is perceived through sensory antennae and valves all over the human body. Her work starts with an interpretation of the world that exists in front of her.
Nature in front of one's body and its various transformations make up her work. For instance, her paintings embody images of nature revealed under the transition of four seasons; nature that intensely reminds her of distant memories from those images; nature that harbors multifarious scenes,
and nature that reflects the artist's mind and inner being.
These paintings are visualized with variegated colors, vibrating strokes, flowing and floating arrangements of paints, while representing, in particular, zesty situations in which boundaries between concrete and abstract, figurative and non-figurative, and intentional representations and fortuitous effects are freely fused, collapsed and overlapped. While starting with a motif induced from a specific object in nature, the emphasis is placed on creating images of sentiments and emotions originated from that motif rather than on a meaningful representation of the object itself.
Art critic Park said nature is a concrete place where we live. To live in the world is to be associated with a specific space. Even in artificial cities, nature remains as a stage for self-realization and adventures as well as for aesthetics.
Space also restrains our desire to experience another world while we are rooted in this world, our interest in transcendence and desire for art.
   The differences in the cultures and arts of the East and the West also result from the differences in understandings of natural space, the art critic said.
Paintings of mountains and streams in the East and landscape paintings in the West demonstrate such differences in the aesthetic experience of nature. Accordingly, a 'landscape'is engendered at the moment when one encounters the world before herself, the professor said.
It comes from establishing a relationship between one who exists in the world and the world she is faced with as in the one between 'ye'and 'you.'A landscape comes into existence when 'you'become related to the 'me'who perceives the world. Therefore, a landscape does not simply mean a projected form of nature, but it is rather a phenomenon of an image created inside an artist motivated by nature.
Painter Park also finds motifs for her work from natural scenery, the art critic said. Here nature is made up of plants, flowers and the whole in which their scents and the air are fervently mingled, and she intends to paint them. She does not consider nature as just a visual object but reifies her senses and feelings derived from experiencing it. "While vividly expressing the sense of sweetness, beauty and fullness I felt from nature with somewhat primary and bright colors, I like to convey charming little stories within it,"said the painter in her notes.
Park's work expresses impressions and feelings she gets from the objects on a plain canvas using only the most basic figurative elements of painting-lines and colors. Deviating from concrete depictions or realistic representations of an object, her paintings represent the emotions or the feelings of the artist as well as those of the viewers and, thus, the paintings have become other entities that stand as independently as actual objects. Perhaps this is characteristic of contemporary art, the critic said.
She has held 14 solo exhibitions and participated in over 150 group exhibitions including more than 20 overseas shows in such places as New York, France, Japan, China and Italy. nw

Echoes of Nature/91X45cm/Acrylic on canvas/2008

Echoes of Nature/90.9X60.6.cm/Acrylic on canvas/2008

Painter Park Young-In

Echoes of Nature/116.7X72.7cm/Acrylic on canvas/2008

Echoes of Nature/91X45cm/Acrylic on canvas/2008

Echoes of Nature/45X91cm/Acrylic on canvas/2008