Park Hang-Ryul Reflection of the Mind Mirror
Sep 4 - 27, 2009Gana Art Center
'The Bird on the Head,' Becoming One by Disappearing
: On Park Hang-Ryul's Solo Exhibition
Park Shin-Eui
(Art Critic / Professor, Dept. of Arts & Cultural Management, Graduate School of Business Administration, Kyung Hee University)
It has been a long time since I last saw Park Hang-Ryul's works. It was in the years of 1992 and 1993 that I put my heart and soul to translate his paintings into words and so more than sixteen years intervened between then and now. Nevertheless, making the abyss of gap year meaningless, the artist does not seem to have experienced any significant refraction or interruption. I thought perhaps it might be because he has painted constantly and consistently, even though I could not see him in the meantime. As a river flows over and around time, what he is now as a man who has witness the passage of time, only pursuing painting as a profession, obscures the difference which could be possibly caused by the intervening time. And this is why I believe to myself that I know him well: he is always a painter and always maintains an attitude to live a life through the medium of the activity of painting. I am confident of this. It is as if I come to a river after a long while, to find a boat or an islet there, dawn hanging and breezes hovering over on the ripples in a renewed way. It seems to me that the old stories to wait and long for someone, to fill the time of the heaven with the meaning of the abyss with supreme sincerity lay a bridge over the time passed in the interval.
I said as if I newly saw a boat, an islet, dawn, and breezes after I looked at his paintings after a long absence. But these several subjects are not the sign of his change that I found. On the contrary, the change occurred in my way of seeing because I came to see the space of meaning created by the forms, not the forms themselves. I felt his paintings get much closer to nature, for the layers of the implications, symbols, and metaphors of nature are constructing far more profound contexts with simple and concise structures and forms. This may be resulted from that the artist let himself flowing into the deeper depth of nature. Accordingly, Park's paintings reveal constant contexts, which are, of course, not so easy to be designated by some nouns because they have no clear and distinct grammar. This, however, is not unfamiliar to me at all. His time and space are always creating the empty pace, the vacant garden of thinking, and I simply visited in search of the meanings born newly in the emptiness after some while.
The encounter that is not unfamiliar but new. The reason that his works give such impression is that they do not actually describe something. Here, forms and meanings do not correspond one to one by any means. Park always sits before the white canvas 'with comprehensive symbols and metaphors instead of firm question marks.' 'When, from the far side of the heart, spontaneous images begin to fly in wavily, making their shapes and colors visible in no time,' his fingers set out on a 'journey with those portrait images as busily as tourists on their first visit who are eager not to miss even the slightest moment of wonder.' He 'meets a black rainbow trapped in a cool damp fog' sometimes and other times, experiences 'a gloomy midnight erasing even dreams.' However, the journey is not a 'dark escape of the unknown soliloquies' but is like going to the waiting room of meaningful forms and shapes which gather at a window opened wide to the life.' The portrait images he met in the journey 'mediate on the meanings of their life' and ultimately, make the artist look back on himself to understand the 'archetype of life.' With the expression of those who submerge into the dark silence and then come to life by the light of daybreak, his paintings awaken the unexpected meanings with visions, unfinished poetic language.
In a way, they have several grammars. The artist arranges some situations by appropriating the imaginary animals in mythology, or builds certain types of postures of expressions of figures and repeats them with little differences. Still, his intention does not lie in using them only as the subject when he places them, for example, the flying fish, the human-headed bird, or the flying horse, on the canvas. He paints them in order to show the will to the space of mythology, that is, the place where time and space exist as they originally were and the worldly time brings to a stop, but the will which germinates from the womb of conflicts and contradiction of the world. As is known, the human-headed is called "Kalavinka" which builds a nest only in the Buddhist paradise and it implies, I think, that only those who have the ear of the heart can hear the most beautiful song in the world, sung by the bird. But this mythological interpretation is nothing but a minimum condition. Even though I used the word 'grammar' previously, it has meaningful only as the first prerequisite. The viewers will always find that there still remains another step to search for the next context, and this is precisely why those subject painted repeatedly cannot be reduced to types at all.
The image of Kalavinka is connected to the 'bird on the head' that Park met in his travel to Venezia and Mongolia. The 'bird on the head' comes to born again as a dragonfly, a butterfly, a flying fish, a human-headed bird, a pavilion and fine trees, or flowers and a ferryboat, symbolizing the truth of endless circulation like the Buddhist principle of Samsara or the endless cycle of births and rebirths. It seems to me that Samsara may possibly be the continuation of the fruitless will and desire of man on the earth who ceaselessly come and go between 'want to be' and 'cannot be.' Thus, it is in the nature of things that the bridle of the hardships, waiting, and loneliness should be endured to sing the most beautiful song in the world. Probably, the very bridle makes you reflect on yourself, wait for something with yearning, and finally, wish for the moment of becoming one with nature. Relating to the posture of figures, Park once told me that the front position is the first person, the half-profile position, 45 degrees to the painter, is the second person, and the profile position is the third person. This reminds me of the moment of unification when I become you, he becomes I, or you become he. Ironically enough, to the painter, it is only when the subject and the object lose their boundary that they come to be aware of existence again.
In this sense, the images and forms of this artist seem to prepare for 'disappearing.' It is true that they try to settle down as the human-headed bird, the bird on the head, the flying fish, the house on the head, but nevertheless, they all look doomed to disappear: they are all the more splendid because they are so dangerous and it is as if they bear a flower whose shape crumbles instantly and disappears like the light of dawn, like a mist, like the waves. The bird, fish, islet, flowers, dawn and ferryboat is none other than you in me, you outside me. The artist talks about the self who can never return from the place eternally and its long, long longings. The bird in his paintings moves from the level of representation(reality) to that of recollection(association) and the painter's refined intervention makes up for the lack of existence in the imagination. As if sorrowfully saying not full love but impossible love, 'I' is another 'I' who I have already left behind but can never expunge. The 'bird on the head' may be long yearning, or the sign between memories. Sitting on the head, it may hope for the human-headed bird's wish. But all these explanations would be meaningless, for the moment you try to explain it, the existence will be hardened to stone quickly. I think this is why the painter's bird becomes one with the butterfly saying the continuation of irrevocable 'disappearance,' the flapping in that moment, the soaring of memory, and the traces of wind.
And there still remains the fascination of 'tingling with expectation.' Though all the forms prepare to disappear, you are still charmed by the expectation that the vacant space will be filled up again. But ironically, this anticipation is more or less accompanied by the fundamental fear. For this reason, Park's art is poetic. In fact, he is also a very brilliant poet. I mentioned that he has supreme talent to combine the abstractiveness of pictorial language and the pictorialness of poetic language. He could see 'wind's hands clasped in prayer,' walk around 'on a hill where the sky and wind hold each other's hands and turn round and round,' and wanted to paint the moment 'when it looses contours by itself like the desolate soul of a pine tree standing alone,' 'muteness.'. This charm of his bloomed magnificently while I did not see him. He has worked with poet Jeong Ho-Seung, which seems to produce significant results. In a sense, their sentiments and sensitivities are closely alike in the light of poetic language and pictorial plasticity, and their relationship developed to a degree that how they influenced each other's works can be discussed. This beautiful relation where you can realize that paintings work as an expectation to poetry and poetry works as another sense of fullness to paintings. So Park is a man to whom the occupation of a painter is natural more than anyone else, like his saying "O yes. I myself used to be the river like you. It is not that I become one with you, but that you become one with me. Thus, you are now making the sea."