Incense Series: Weightlessness
Park Jihyun
Feb 18 - Mar 20, 2010
New York – Gana Art New York is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Korean artist Jihyun Park. On view from February 18 –March 20, 2010, the show will consist of Park's works on paper.
Lit incense sticks burn themselves into smoke and ash. This transformation into the immaterial helps us better grasp Jihyun Park's Incense Series of works on paper. Park uses incense sticks to burn thousands of tiny holes onto sheets of rice paper to create a unified image. Drawing with a flame, Park inverts the technique of Pointillism by puncturing the fragile paper surface with tiny marks, subtracting rather than adding dots of paint and color.
Creating by erasing, Park's images convey a sense of weightlessness, both in appearance and in reality.
Several of his newer works are titled according to their exact weight (or lightness) as finished products. For Park, the process of erasing results in ephemeral organic forms, ranging from abstract cloud formations and billowing trees to stars in the sky, aptly seared with a thousand points of light.
Deeply influenced by the legendary island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), and also by Hayao Miyazaki's adaptation of the Japanese animation novel, Castle in the Sky, Park's images reveal his abiding fascination with Utopia. Indeed, "incense" or Hyang in Korean puns with "Utopia" in Korean translated as Yi Sang Hyang. The linguistic interweaving of incense and utopia is hospitable to Park's idealized visions of nature, life, and transformation created through a unique medium, at once fragrant and incendiary.
For Park, idealized places and objects are accompanied by precise emotions. One of his works titled "Twenty-third" is an imaginary locale, a street he was led to in a subconscious reverie. Utopia is for Park an extension of his subconscious, where the act of creating by destroying somehow results in the substance of a magical presence.
In his exploration of both traditional and contemporary cultures, Park often falls back on his childhood memories in Korea. In a nod to traditional Eastern ink brush paintings, Park applies black gouache to rice paper and mounts the finished works onto traditional-style scrolls. The collision of the old and the new sparks Jihyun Park's quest to capture Utopia within an ever-changing, never-tangible cultural and ideological terrain.
Gana Art: 568 W 25th Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm
Public Information: T: (212)-229-5828
Opening reception: Thursday, February 18, 2010: 6 – 8pm