JINA PARK: ROCKS, SMOKE, AND PIANOS
Kukje Gallery is pleased to present Rocks, Smoke, and Pianos, a solo exhibition by Jina Park.
December 3, 2024 - January 26, 2025
In this first presentation of the artist’s work in the gallery’s Seoul space since her Busan solo exhibition in 2021, Park showcases 36 new works using oil and watercolor that explore site-specific locations including a museum exhibition hall, a restaurant kitchen, and a piano factory. Here, she continues to use photography as the basis of her painting practice, reconstructing scenes captured through her camera. Since her Lomography series (2004-07), where Park used a Lomo camera, Park has assigned herself the task of creating paintings not bound by the subject, action, or event, but instead focusing on transforming utterly quotidian moments into painterly subjects that occur in an invisible dimension of space.
The works organized around the motif of “smoke” depict busy scenes inside the restaurant kitchen at Kukje Gallery. Lastly, works gathered around “pianos” are Park’s latest series that explores the inner details of where Steingraeber pianos are manufactured in Bayreuth (a town located in northern Bavaria), Germany, which Park visited this year. These sites chosen by the artist share the characteristics of being everyday places of labor where workers in each industry carry out their responsibilities behind the “Staff Only” signs. Given her framing approach, one might assume that the activity of these individuals is the most important subject in each scene. However, in the moments captured by Park’s camera, where chance becomes a key element, there are really no dramatic actions, narratives, or pre-assigned meanings.
For example, in the Kitchen series (2022-24), what takes up a large portion of the canvas is a crowded countertop covered with various cooking utensils, and smoke rising into the air, as much as the figures concentrated in action. Also, the lines and color planes that compose the scene become an event in themselves as in the rectangular vinyl sheets dispersed rhythmically on the exhibition floor in the Red Letters series (2023-24); in the orange floor that takes up two thirds of the painting in the Rocks series (2023-24); or in the bold lines and curves that traverse the canvas in the Piano Factory series (2024). Figures in ambiguous poses with no intention of conveying meaning merely hint at their context and the speculation of the “before” and “after” of the scene—giving a sense of tension to the painting. This tension arises from the fact that, while the painting originates in everyday subjects captured through Park’s camera, it eliminates the social context or direct meaning they may hold, highlighting the formal and compositional relationships of the lines, planes and colors. In other words, the tension is intensified as Park heads forth in her experimentation towards art for art’s sake.
This exhibition is a journey in which Park traverses traditional boundaries that exist between drawing and painting, figuration and abstraction, as well as photography and painting. By inserting discordant gaps into what appears to be a smooth surface of the painting, she seeks her own approach to the question, “What is the pictoriality of painting?”