Park MinJoon was born in Seoul, Korea in 1971 and received his MFA from Hongik University in 2006, followed by postgraduate studies at Tokyo National University of the Arts in 2007.
Park is an artist who constructs unique fictional worlds through reinterpretations of classical paintings. His works, which are distinctive for their sense of theatrical fantasy, are philosophical variations on themes such as life and death, hope and failure, and dreams and reality. Even as he seeks out the potential and essential nature of Western painting techniques, Park seems to usher us towards a place where new mythologies are created by intermingling them with human figures defamiliarized through an East Asian sensibility.
The modes of artistic expression deployed towards this end are multilayered, and encompass literature, painting, and sculpture. As a novelist, Park has published Rapport Circus (2018) and Two Flags (2020), and has expanded the scope of the world of his work by reconstructing characters and scenes from these novels in the form of paintings and sculptures.
This exhibition will showcase a diverse range of works that delicately trace the boundaries between reality and unreality, using the sensation of myō (Oddities) as a guiding principle.
A reception will be held on Friday, March 7 from 4pm with the artist, who will be visiting Japan. We look forward to welcoming you.
Comments from the artist
When forms created by the imagination differ from reality, a space corresponding to that distance arises. A kind of emotion takes root in between these spaces that open up in this way, which I would like to define as myō. This feeling of myō borders the boundary between reality and unreality, and the larger the space of that boundary, the stronger the sensation of myō. When the discrepancy between reality and unreality becomes too great, a bizarre and uncannily strange sensation comes into play. If one is to pursue this myō, however, one must be wary of these kinds of excessive emotions. In general, that which is skilful or adroit gives one a sense of stability, while that which is clumsy or awkward produces an unpleasant feeling of discomfort. A sensation of myō arises at the point where a moderate balance between stability and discomfort is achieved. The works in this exhibition were created on the basis of this hypothesis. I hope that viewers will be able to experience this sensation of myō together with me.
