The Gaze of Introspection_curated by Joo Baek PARK
Purity, beauty, and longing and eagerness... In front of Park’s work, one can feel a deep and silent resonance. A reverberation with a sense of nervousness shudders explosively when staring at the eyes of a pure soul. We find ourselves facing to avoid the contemporary time, which is stained with dread and a hidden truth inside the purity. The eyes of children bear witness to disasters that humans have made themselves such as the war and ecological catastrophes; such catastrophes are still an ongoing process in the eyes as well as in our memories, and approaching us accusingly and silently.
Through the children’s eyes, Park asks questions about human existence that humans are living in this contemporary time stained with pains. Simultaneously, Park screams out to bring the state of nature back from the disasters occurring now.
His work is a process of endurance, which is the process of creating images by carefully engraving stones piece by piece. Through such time-consuming process, he strives to be truly aware of his own existence and discover the truth in confronting the works of art. As the artist attempts to answer the question about his own existence and find its truth through his work, when we stare at the children's eyes he hopes that we face the reality that used to be neglected, allowing us to recall the right values that we should pursue.
As his saying, “Art helps to awaken and regain facts in the minds of those who forgets or loses, prior great praise for its beauty,” Park's work, which places the sharp and painful truth on a stone, has a special power that leads to awakening and discovering the human existence.
