Seung-soon PARK, Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art
Birth
1954, Seoul
Genre
Painting, Installation
Homepage
Episode 14-21, 22, 2014
Oil on Canvas, 91 x 116.8cm
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Urban spaces, stories of ordinary people
Contemporary art has been modified and evaluated in the border between abstraction and representation. These two genres follow current trend and spread in various ways, and the distinction between these two genres becomes more and more vague. Seung-soon Park’s” Urban-Story” series provides restful time and spaces to everyone who is stuck in the middle seeking a new direction.
The subjects of “Urban space- Stories” series cover from giant buildings, residential spaces, coexisting nature, and human beings. The artist stimulates excitement by juxtaposing two contrasting factors of the space, such as detailed and the fourth dimensional, or sometimes realistic and unrealistic characteristics.
The artist’s philosophical depth delivers in color tones, the flow of lines, and the texture of the surface of the paintings because Seung-soon Park establishes his own pictorial genre and unique techniques rather than expresses the boundary between the abstraction and the concreteness. Escaping from using just flat canvases, he seeks for new methods such as placing straightened and curved wood panels on the canvas to constitute flat surface and relief at the same time, various approaches in multi-dimensional spaces, and installation using already existing sculptures.
The artist tries to approach the audiences who are not familiar with pictorial art or feel divergence from artistic world with the combination of his basic canvas works and the maximum application of small spaces, objects, and architectural elements instead of expressing gigantic spaces in urban area. He also involves the symbolic meaning that the human beings and other various objects coexist in a gigantic city itself. The artist’s hopeful message that the people who are trapped in the framework and live like machines can be inspired by diverse experiences in the spaces he created arouse my sympathy.
Straight and curved lines in loud colors follow in their own rules, and increase some tensions. The surface of the objects that represent urban spaces is expressed simply and implicatively. Even the afterimage of the endless repetition of brushstrokes can be traced from the quality and thickness of the wood on a canvas, fabric surfaces, and pigment trails.
The desire of the artists is providing a new understanding that stimulates the transition to a dynamic image from a static image to modern people who constantly pursue a vision and a new direction by the appropriate blend of sensuous and relief aspects. This is probably what he wants to show in “Urban-story” exhibition.
Urban spaces refer the places that the artist is living in, and also the living spaces of contemporary ordinary people. The artist intends to interpret the futility or illusions of modern people’s daily city life in a positive way. This exhibition would be a chance to reflect your own story in the stories of contemporary modern people.
I am looking forward to have a further chance to enjoy another series of
Jimin Lee, Chief curator, Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art
