Yooah Park: Music Boxs
Yooah Park has continued to experiment with various media throughout her career, ever since her first solo exhibition in New York City in 1990. As a child, she studied the millennia-old technique of Korean royal portraiture under Jong Sang Lee, the last remaining master of the art. She pursued her college degree in traditional painting at Ewha Women’s University, where she gained proficiency in traditional media such as ink and color paintings, ceramics, and seal engravings. While showing her work around the world including Seoul, New York, Tokyo, Moscow, and Mexico City, she broadened her reach to more modern and contemporary materials through her pulp and metal installations, performances, video, and photography.
For Music Box, her second solo exhibition at Opsis Art, Park has composed 23 color paintings through an ancient technique utilizing mineral pigments on paper. The work, at first glance, resembles watercolors or acrylics on canvas, but it is in fact uniquely “Eastern.” The painstakingly multi-step process demands incredible amount of time and patience: the artist brushes 50 coats of agyo—a kind of glue made from bones, hide, and other parts of animals—to prime each sheet of mulberry paper. The highly absorbent material soaks up the primer to offer enough resistance to each color, which Park also prepares from start to finish: she grinds the lumps of mineral pigments by hand in a mortar, then uses her fingers to grind them into an even finer texture. Using such a process now, when ready-to-use paints are easily available, the artist’s choice of colors must be especially deliberate.
Each of her small pieces depicts what appears to be a couple, accompanied by an occasional child. The artist has given clearly recognizable features to the children, but has painted over the faces of the pairs in white. The critical instant—or the momentary
“flash,” to borrow Walter Benjamin’s terminology—captured by the artist communicates a sense of charged significance, yet, one cannot clearly discern the expressions of the protagonists. A close look reveals faint traces of the faces that Park first painted then chose to erase. The composition, however, denies priority to these specific individuals. Instead, she accentuates the spaces between and surrounding the couples, their physical gestures, and other “props” so that the work resembles genre paintings or even landscapes, rather than portraits. A portrait relies on a subject’s facial features to draw out his/her idiosyncratic character and psychological state; by erasing these, Park articulates the state of relations between the faceless figures. Individuals thus recede and allow the artist’s meditation on the concept of a “couple” to emerge.
At her last solo exhibition at Opsis Art, Park painted her face red, stripping herself as raw as the glistening slabs of meat before her. In the current exhibition, the artist makes an even bolder move—she strips bare the facades of friends and family to reveal the sometimes not-so-subtle dynamics lurking beneath the “faces” they put on before others. She first photographs the couples in her close proximity at casual settings: her siblings and their spouses at the dining table, her parents taking a walk through a wooded trail, wedded friends at informal gatherings, and even herself with her former partner. She then paints from the images that have captured that critical instant, when the nature of each relationship has laid itself open to scrutiny.
Humor certainly comprises a large part of these paintings. The artist laughs knowingly with them—the kind of “making fun” that is only possible through intimacy with her subjects. But the humor is also tainted with a cynicism. Her own portraits most blatantly display the dark undersides of this idea of a couple, from which she is not exempt: she, too, was once one half of a pair. When she recalls her past in order to describe the spaces between herself and her former partner, they come as detailed and directly felt experiences. One such painting—the largest of the whole set—opens the show and lays the foundation for the rest of the pieces. The visual becomes the path to feel the relationship between the couples. Park opens a small window into each, gently—but insistently—inducing us to begin an open dialogue about what many keep under the table.