I, Hyunwook Park (b. 1984, Seoul, South Korea), am a graduate in BFA Fine art (traditional Korean Painting, 2011), BA Cross-Cultural Studies (2011), BA Studies of Glocal-Culture Contents (2011), MFA Fine art (traditional Korean Painting) at Sung Kyun Kwan university and MFA Fine art at UCL Slade School of Fine Art (2020). During the period, I had twice of solo exhibitions, 12 times of group exhibition and twice of collaboration shows with a dance team.
About my work, simply say, my works are started from parting, losing, throwing away, leaving and separating in everyday life. I tried to represent ordinary but unique existence and their disappearing includes ourselves. Since 2013, Missing Pages is the main title and theme of a project negotiating with such problems as time, existence, and expiration. It consists of drawings, paintings, and sculptures that represent humdrum objects in everyday life. The goal of this project is to renew the meanings of the neglected objects that have yet to demise, by taxonomizing their visual forms, and exuviae littered around us. In short, I am highlighting everyday, life, time, objects and places as meaningful and unique ones. I expect to represent emotional or spiritual parts rather than objective reality. At the same time, I try to avoid that the objects in my works are regarded as symbols. Recently, I found that I also have curiosity, craving and adore life and time and I am trying to expand my work with those minds.
In terms of painting, I am trying to combining traditional Korean painting and contemporary European painting. Splitting and combining layers is also one of the most interesting topics recently. For instance, I am experimenting to use various materials in one painting (not mixing) or combining several pages of paintings into one work to make layers. In the case of resin works, encapsulating objects in resin in a wooden box make those visible but distant. Also, viewers can open and close the wooden boxes but these are showing only one side. These factors highlight revealing, hiding and distancing. At the same time, I expect these works can be shown as a sculpture like a painting and a painting like a sculpture.
About selling my artwork, I expect that the progress of selling the works one by one depicts that the memories are dimming and being abstracted. If I can have an exhibition with all of these pieces after all pieces are sold, this process can be regarded as a reminding. All of those are not only for visual joy and exploration but also for searching for various ways to reveal lives, moments and existence with my sight.
