Kejoo Park

Kejoo Park’s solo exhibition at Space 776, titled Echoes in Time, features abstract and lyrical landscape paintings, some of which could be interpreted as semi-figurative. Curated by Irene Gong, the exhibition is divided into three parts. The first is the Song of the Earth series, based on Gustav Mahler’s Late-Romantic composition Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). The second is the Wanderer series, which explores immersing oneself in nature. The third is the Visible-Invisible series, inspired by Joseph Beuys’s public art project 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks). Why has Park concerned herself with nature and environmental activist art (as in the case of the Visible-Invisible series), as well as the Western interpretation of Eastern philosophy and views on nature?

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Park comes from a career in landscape architecture spanning more than 30 years, during which she developed a professional interest in and philosophy on the reciprocal impact between humans and their environment. Her philosophy of landscape architecture is based on a three-part system of principles: the restoration of nature, its idealization, and its creation as an artificial form of nature. As an Easterner who has studied art and architecture in the West, Park incorporates Western methodologies of inquiry and thinking into her Eastern ways of being and perceiving.

 

Her first project to manifest as public art was The Earth Project, which referenced Song of the Earth by the late 19th-century Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (born in Bohemia). Mahler himself drew upon 83 Chinese poems translated by Hans Bethge, based on Taoist teachings and philosophy, including those of Tang Dynasty poets Li Bai and Wang Wei. A similar idea about the relationship between humans and nature is expressed in 19th- and 20th-century Western perception, particularly in Romanticism. Park, a Korean artist who engages with both Eastern and Western modes of thinking and creating, reinterprets and transforms this idea.

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The core tenet of Taoism and Eastern thought is dualism, where reality is divided into light and dark, with darkness residing within the light and vice versa. This principle is also the basis of the South Korean flag, which was designed by late Joseon Dynasty scholars and later simplified for greater elegance, following suggestions from a British naval officer.

 

In Park’s paintings, heavy, dark forms and values often dominate the composition. Yet, through techniques involving translucency and repeated glazing of wet, flowing colors and layers, the artist achieves a sense of light within this pervasive darkness. For example, this illusion of light within controlled darkness is evident in works such as Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth (2021), The Lonely One in Autumn 1 (2021), and On Youth (2022), all part of The Earth Project. In these works, the white, which traditionally represents the brighter values of light, appears subdued, cold, and lethargic compared to the vibrant blacks, which contain rich, translucent layers of information and depth. The artist intentionally creates a paradox where the bright whites are thick and exist superficially as opaque surfaces, while the dark forms conceal hidden layers and meanings.

 

Park intentionally challenges the traditional hierarchy of Western painting, which promotes an ideology that prioritizes light as the provider of information and views darkness as lacking in information and meaning. By imbuing the darkness with greater depth and information than the light, the artist actively subverts this Western construct of color and value.

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The same phenomenon occurs in the Visible-Invisible series, where the dark values and forms build up more information and layers than the opaque white surfaces. Park painted over initial layers of photos and sketches with dark, human-like or obelisk-like figures, referencing Joseph Beuys’s public art project involving environmental activism, which included planting 7,000 oaks, each accompanied by a basalt stone. In Homage to Joseph Beuys 3 (2024), it is unclear whether the hat is worn by one of the dark, obelisk-like figures or if it holds another symbolic meaning on the ground. This ambiguity raises questions about what is seen and unseen and what is recognized as art.

 

In a time when everyone aspires to be an artist and storage spaces overflow with artworks owned by affluent collectors, what limits art history’s bandwidth and our understanding of art? Park likely pondered these issues upon seeing how one location of Beuys’s art project in Manhattan became cluttered with garbage bags, suggesting that people had forgotten or failed to recognize the work as art. The series also explores how Park inverts the bandwidth of information in the light and shadows of her paintings. How do the art canon and the narrative of art history reveal or conceal meanings based on prejudices and the binary system of hierarchical thinking?

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In conclusion, what may initially appear as a typical landscape painting is, in fact, an Eastern perspective on Western painting. Park’s work embodies a revolutionary zeal that challenges our conventional understanding of—and biases regarding—value in light and dark, as well as our historical and current approach to painting, which has predominantly Western origins. The artist disrupts the binary opposition of Western thought, which often constructs racial and cultural hierarchies, and replaces it with the dualism of Yin and Yang. This framework maintains continuity between Yang and Yin, with light containing darkness and vice versa.

 

Her work is then not a traditional landscape painting of nature but, instead, a thesis on the linguistically impossible reality that is ours in which division exists within the unity, and the unity exists within the division, which can only be fully guessed at through the intuitive means of pictorial language and cannot be fully contained within a logical, fully articulated, written or verbal language.