Sang-mi Park - A Civilized and Denaturalized Nature
Young-taek Park (Art critic & Professor, Kyonggi University)
Sometimes a mere mundane landscape looks strange all of sudden. There is a moment when the object suddenly stirs our emotions and makes our thinking complicated without any particular reason despite its frequent accessibility and familiarity – as if the scene talked to us eerily and caused in us peculiar feelings. This is hard to explain or describe in language or words. It is like everything squirmy and sticky and letting out some kind of sound. Those listening to the sound of objects and looking at familiar things in a fresh and unfamiliar manner every time and with a long gaze break the stereotype of the world, break out of the conventional molds and greet others with compassion. They are the artists.
Artist Park Sang-mi has paid attention to potted plants in everyday life. Various plant pots in a flower shop, an indoor area, a hallway or by the wall embrace green leaves and colorful flowers. One day, they caught her attention and appeared afresh. In other words, the ordinary pots and familiar plants, which were scattered here and there, created a strange ambience on the whole and captivated her. There was a communication between the objects and the artist at last. That is about art. Art is 'a strange thing' through which one experiences the mundane scenes and objects becoming significant beings all of sudden - that is, a time for, say, communion with God, communicating with objects and activating animist creativity. As a result, the objects become the main subject and compete on an equal footing. Portraying such an experience, or an unknown but certainly perceptible thing, is painting – the impression, experience and memory of the unordinary encounter and a gesture to reach the aura. Therefore, it can be said that painting is a futile trial to paint the unknown and ambiguous. This is to reproduce the feeling, sensation and atmosphere of an instant moment when one was caught off-guard as if being poked sharply.
A pot, which is placed at a specific location (or flower garden, aquarium, garden, etc.) in an indifferent fashion, comes into sight. It could be there for the purposes of interior decoration, nature management amid the crude artifacts, or beyond those purposes. The artist saw the strangely placed and directed nature. Seeing, or observing, leads to lots of thoughts and subsequently an intervention by the artist through the intermingling of everything she has. Because of this, sort of wounds become materialized in the end by sticking to the skin of the object - a painting. The utterly beautiful but somewhat shabby and pathetic landscape begins to speak. The pots that are taken care of by someone in the city are an 'intended nature' and also an imitated nature, separated from nature. In a way, it is also like a desperate signal barely embracing the vitality of nature pathetically in the desolate city of infertility. Although she has always and long noticed this, she realizes that it captivates her eye and heart in a totally new form at this moment. In other words, she got a crush on it. Such a phenomenon is also called 'aura.' The artist captured the scene by taking a photograph, sketching and stamping on her memory. Then she reproduced the scene based on such a collection - a directed painting with the intention of emphasizing what she saw and felt. After all, all paintings represent another world filtered through the frame of emotions or senses of an individual. It is a separate world, with reference to the existing world though. However, such a world was clearly derived from the real outer space. Art always lives off something existent and thus is a trace of it. In other words, art is a 'strange view of the world' incorporated with the body of an individual who sees, feels and senses the outer world and the world.
Park's painting shows the contrast of textures of ink spread and flat, clear and abstract color dimensions, while oriental black ink and colors coexist on the traditional paper. In her oriental ink painting, a certain scene is depicted to the point that evokes pleasure on the whole and in between various rich colors are filled, though there are differences in concentration and chroma. This scene, which was created based on photographs and computer work, implies the flat surface of photography and digital pixel imagery, while resembling silk screen printing in the methodological perspective. The hand-made vs. machine-made feels coexist, while a combination of the monotone and wrinkled drawing feels, resulting from the vertical line drawn with oil pastel on the color dimensions emphasizing the flat surface and where oriental ink was applied, creates a strange atmosphere. This evokes a mysterious sensation. Meanwhile, the vertical line hidden in the black ink contains the properties and determination of plants growing towards a light source - the sun, and reveals the stream of consciousness of the artist who sees and perceives it in a rhythmical manner. On the contrary, the strictly color-painted part is to put an intentional emphasis and place a side point, which symbolizes a taxidermied, artificial nature and deliberately evaporates the 'touch' of the hand or corporeality.
The artist creates a world of urbanized plants (nature) living off the city by combining dissimilar elements of oriental ink and colors. Her painting is directed with the intention of presenting plants (nature) for mere decorative purposes that were forcedly included in the urban space and paradoxically stress the vitality of plants that keep on surviving in a strong and resilient manner. People will be gone but plants will grow forever in a perpetual cycle. Meanwhile, a variety of plants that can be easily found in our daily lives, particularly the small red plastic pots densely displayed on the shelf, give a glimpse of their fate, which is to be monitored and controlled by someone. This enables us to ruminate on our existence behind the scenes in the city. Flower pots in the garden and plants in the aquarium do not appear to be any different from us who live in the apartment complexes. Although the plants cannot grow as freely as vegetation in nature, they adapt to the urban environments in their own way. This is similar to our lives. Like us (city dwellers), plants survive by becoming adjusted to the city though being confined under the control by people. The same goes for us. Park's painting poses a question on how to bring nature back into our lives today after having escaped from nature. Here are the city dwellers' pathetic yearning and compassion for nature.
Our ancestors found the purpose of life in everything from their living space - the natural environments. Through this, old scholars sought a place for living with grace and dignity, saw beauty and eternity in nature and thus yearned for and tried to resemble nature very much. Such a pure longing for life was captured in a frame: landscape painting and 'Four Gracious Plants (plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo).' Painting materializes the senses of the artist after all. The senses are converged into her view of the world and existence. Without them, art cannot achieve anything. In this way, the ancestors found clues to maturity and reason as a human from the mountains, trees, stones, water, soil, fauna and flora around and all existences in life form on earth. They must have studied by looking closely at those and figure out their reason and also transcribing it. No wonder that landscape painting and 'Four Gracious Plants' originated from such a background. Come to think of it, nature is an innate factor for humans and the foundation for an archetypal experience, whether in the East or West and whether in ancient times or today. Humans, at last, stand on their feet through experiences in the natural environments where they were born and raised. Sensitivity to nature has been inevitably melted in the human conditions already. Thus, in the oriental culture, embodying and aestheticizing nature was so natural from the perspective of Korean traditional art history. Although affinity towards nature today has been broken and relationships between nature, culture and art have changed, it is difficult to deny that nature still serves as an infinite source of inspiration for artists. The painter plays a role as a bridge in deep waters of people and nature. To that end, she attempts to achieve the so-called pantheistic empathy. The painter is eager to go inside nature, the soul of flowers. In this sense, art is a fundamental existence behind the phenomenal world, with a desire to reach there. The painter intends to capture the scene she saw and felt with her senses eagerly and desperately. Through this, the artist would feel that she is alive. After all, painting is close to a trial to ‘prove existence.’ What was encountered through the body with senses and subsequently what was formed by the body is solely mine, which amounts to the only existence. The key message through painting is that there are close relationships between all life forms in nature and therefore a sense of solidarity exists. Between all organisms, there is no difference in quality and thus there is a belief that they all make up a gigantic community together. Such a belief of unity and continuity of life (with no breaks) is no other than the oriental view of the world and the universe.
Sang-mi Park 's painting is a result of portraying the plants (nature) that were captured in her daily life in a composed manner through her vivid intuitive real-life experiences. At the same time, it demonstrates an interest in how nature imagery is generated in the cultural, visual environments of our times. It also shows what the yearnings for getting closer to nature are, as it is difficult to encounter nature in urban life. The flower garden, flower pots, the aquarium and the garden realizing the desires are where the real and the fake coexist and the space presents an invisible network of power that controls nature. Therefore, the plants and nature Park painted are asking a question about the meaning of existence of the vegetation in the urban environments. In this context, her work still encounters the old tradition of oriental painting.