YONG SIK   PARK

Blurring the borderline

 

There are many kinds of borders: between countries, regions, civilizations, between what is real and what isn’t, and between individuals.

 

In my previous works I mingled the borders between reality and fantasy or between regions and between strata, presenting the realm of borders. This piece is focused on the myriad of borders set by man to distinguish manifold things, as well as the borders between nations or civilizations. The space in which to live and apparatus to destroy it-these things exist as devices, contraptions, or even a consciousness for man’s survival. There is a thought in our brain that the visage of the ideals we seek are not such ‘division’ but ‘togetherness’. But sometimes, the realization of ideals sometimes gives birth to an unrealistic situation.

 

In my works, the borders neither mean disconnection, nor do I try to erase them. They represent the vagueness of the existing borders and the expansion and acknowledgement of them. The world is too large and multifaceted to be divided by a thin line or a definition. And maybe, it is continuously modified without our knowing.

 

This isn’t to signify that everything is equal-the reason for their classification. But as the member the same dimension, everything is important; because existence is enough value for respect.

 

Some of the pieces in this exhibition are stemmed from the works from 2002, some from the fourth and fifth solo exhibitions, and works produced by interconnecting these pieces. They can be put into two categories.

 

First are the pieces conjoining the cartoonish fantasy I liked in childhood and reality. I would be watching TV, believing what I see in it to be real. Perhaps not in such cartoonish forms, but as an adult, I still confuse the fabricated displays on the media with what is actually happening. These experiences prompted the mixture of sculpture based on fantasy and background from the real world. The stories it tells are my stories. The little, everyday tales were composed as a sort of role-play. <Dog and Wine Bottle> of 2008 used the liquor bottle and the bag of a location, as was the case in the Korean version, <Dog and Soju Bottle>, then taken photographs with the place as the backdrop and presented the result. The backdrop and the prop varies from time to time, but the places people live, the things they go through, and the emotions they feel are not so different. <Confrontation of Three>, <Flying the Borderline>, <On Line> are pieces from previous solo exhibitions. With <On Line> as an exception, the other two photographs were re-produced to fit with the location of the exhibition, as being a bit smaller than before. The story of the piece may be trimmed a bit, but the formula was the same in producing an animal from fantasy and placing it in the backdrop of reality.

 

Pieces in the other category are the trees from <Confrontation of Three> conjoined. There are many things specified by man: this and that, tangible and abstract. But as we get closer to the fringe of these borders we feel that these classifications are by no means precise: our emotions can be complexly compounded, or when we finally reach the truth of what we thought we knew, it feels like the pathetic conceit of humankind. The paint on the tree branches as well as flowers made from rubber sponge and pins display qualities of both nature and artificiality. From the human (things, knowledge, civilization) and non-human (nature) conditions, nothing can display only one of these qualities. This is how the appearance or circumstance of every piece has its own meaningful story. The pieces with the title <Blurring the Borderline> are drawings of the differences and likeness we feel as an individual in this world and as a ‘natural man’. I sketched and painted the form of people or things found in local or international magazines and on the internet; afterwards, to obscure the shapes, I smeared the paint over the paper, disintegrating the semblance of the form. On one hand, the pieces represent the original circumstances, but they may also be seen as another. It may simply be the blurring of borders in painting, or the blurring of borders between me as an individual and others.

 

Yong Sik Park