Kyungjoo Park: The Various Lives of Things 

 

Jonathan Goodman

 

Now teaching at Hongik University, Kyungjoo Park is an artist whose pop ceramic sculpture addresses ongoing consumer issues both in Asia and the West. Park, who holds a doctorate from Hongik, also studied at New York University in New York City, where she took a master’s degree in fine art. So she is a Korean artist familiar with New York’s emphasis on popular culture; her current work, playful and deliberately decorative, shows a familiarity with the pervasiveness of the object, materialism being an ongoing condition not only in America but in Asia as well. Park is serious about play—her art installs a sense of genuine enjoyment in the reality of the world, its obsession with surface ornament and the accumulation of things. Interestingly, there is, at least on the surface, no judgment about contemporary life in her work; rather, she embraces its variousness and, by implication, its tolerance of a lifestyle not everyone would agree with. The sheer numbers of things crowding the world is her theme, which is wedded to a light-hearted reading of its increasing pervasiveness in world culture. Park’s celebration of the acquisition—the purchase—of store goods makes it clear that shopping is more than a pastime for the middle and upper classes across geography; it is a way of life, a manner of existence that is replacing older values.

 

But there is more here than praise of materialism. It becomes clear why Park has chosen to surround herself and her audience with sculptures suggestive of praise of the acquisition. It allows her to participate in the immediacies of her culture, which has more or less become part of a worldview. Ever since the career of Andy Warhol, enjoyment has become a necessity in new art, which usually tracks society’s imagination pretty accurately in a group sense. Yet, as time goes on, Park’s creativity will look increasingly like a sharp reading of consumer culture, whose emphasis on the pleasures of shopping has become close to ubiquitous throughout the world. The artist’s reliefs of airplanes and televisions, lipsticks and hearts, colorfully reflect the eroticization of buying. And while this insight is far from new, it is only relatively current in Asian culture, whose Confucian background made it a bit more resistant in terms of the commercialization of art.

 

But that has all changed now. Park recognizes this and brilliantly describes the situation Koreans find themselves in. It is hard to turn away from her pocketbooks and cone bras, which lightheartedly underscore the reality of materialism in her country. Ever since Warhol, popular art has accurately registered the material needs of people, and has resulted in a vision that has spread to, and to some extent been modified by, her own culture. There is a naïve twist to Park’s art, which may wish to transcend her society’s conditions simply by reiterating its desires. Televisions and airplanes are common in her imagery; but they may speak for more than simply themselves, being representative of both communication and flight, respectively. In a general way, Park’s work feels innocent, existing outside the irony that now accompanies the pop art impulse in New York and other American art centers. One understands that the work needs to be accurate in terms of its rendering, for such accuracy helps her art retain its three-dimensional effectiveness. But the larger issue is one of social description—at what point should the artist assume responsibility for the implied politics of her work? Is she merely describing or ultimately judging the situation she finds herself in?

 

Actually, it is hard to say. Imitation is usually understood as a form of flattery. Yet the intensity of Park’s imagination implies, likely on a deeper, even unconscious, level, a critique of what she sees and represents. The politics implicit in her vision become explicit over time: Park is asking, despite or because of her humorous approach, if we really need everything that we have. Her myriad things provide her audience with an erotics of consumerism. Still, we know that pleasure comes with a price—namely, the blunting of perception. As time goes on, it will become clear that Park’s art doesn’t necessarily champion acquisition. Instead, it describes circumstances that are increasingly difficult to evade. Contemporary art is of course part of the culture it is representing, so it is fair to see Park as belonging to a world lifestyle based upon purchasing things not truly needed. Certainly, the artist cannot create what she sees in complete innocence. As a result, we must read her efforts as defining more than what we would call the surface of things. Seen in this light, Park is critiquing, rather than acquiescing to, the consumer culture she must participate in. Her innocence is not as innocent as it would seem. ●

 

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