YONG SIK   PARK

Park Yong-sik One-man Exhibition

"Art and Discourse" December 2004 Issue

By Lee Seon-young, Art Critic

 

Some animals such as mouse, duck, cat and dog perform the leading role in Park Yong-sik's pieces. They are all domesticated, appear to be anthropomorphic and coexist with humans in urban areas. They hold a house party, go on vacation and have a war council to defeat vicious property developers.

 

As if in fancy goods, they look all the more funny and pretty as well. Park Yong-sik's works are often rendered by a melding of real with created images. The animals play in his work as a substitute for humans. As men are closely linked to them, it is meaningless to define humans independently from animals. It is known that the domestication of animals set off when the hunter-gatherer economy had been replaced by agricultural societies. As the mode of production remained systemized, the impulsive animality inherent in inner self became acclimated.

 

Dominique Lestel in his book "Animality" points out that breeding animals brings about the occupation and exploitation of animals by humans and the friendly relationship between them. The interplay between humans and animals is engendered in the processes of domesticating, breeding, hunting, and struggling with time. Especially breeding causes them to lose their animality and at last falls to the state of an object. Park's animals are a good example of this case.

 

The function of animals, whether for pet, for meat or for scientific experiment, appears culturally different from its original in nature. In Park Yong-sik's works the animals take on the outer appearance of objects or commodities. As if on the chessboard playing an invisible game, his animals provide satirical humor like "Animal Farm" by George Orwell.

 

As Donna Haraway puts it, the body and community are the machine and market for production and reproduction as well. If man and nature are systematically constructed by the logic of capitalism, the maximization of hereditary gains is selected. A stable strategy for evolution is sought to achieve the maximum of profits under the extremely complex economical, political situation of capitalism. To be governed are organic life, instinct and gender. An anthropomorphic nature in Park's work conveys a capitalistic viewpoint on nature and has a tendency to satirize it.