Soi Park: Curated by An-My Lê by CUE Art Foundation

Soi Park

Curated by An-My Lê

Soi Park Dear Home MARCH 16 - APRIL 20, 2013

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

CUE FELLOWS

Gregory Amenoff Theodore S. Berger Sanford Biggers Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian Kuan Corina Larkin Joyce E. Robinson Jan Rothschild Brian D. Starer

Polly Apfelbaum Theodore S. Berger, Chair Ian Cooper William Corbett Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Deborah Kass Corina Larkin Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow Carolyn Somers

CURATORIAL ADVISORY COUNCIL Gregory Amenoff William Corbett Lynn Crawford Trenton Doyle Hancock Sharon Lockhart Thomas Roma Marjorie Welish Andrea Zittel

Lilly Wei

STAFF Jeremy Adams, Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese, Associate Director Jessica Gildea, Associate Director of Programs Sara Lotty, Development Coordinator

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CUE Art Foundation is a dynamic visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for emerging artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, studio residencies, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists and audiences with sustaining and meaningful experiences and resources.

/Bio

Soi Park

Soi Park was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase College in 2007 and completed her MFA in photography from Yale University in 2011. She has been featured in Art Chicago, NEXT 2011; New Insight at the Renaissance Society, and Spectra 2010 at the Silvermine Art Center. She is also the recipient of the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship. She currently lives and works in New York City. This marks her first solo exhibition.

/Statement

Nestled in the soil, the roots of the seedling spread, anchoring it to the land. Through seasons, rain, and weather, the seedling becomes a tree. If you were to cut one of its branches and plant it somewhere else, the branch would set down tenuous new roots. Slowly, again, it would grow into a tree. This is how I understand human migration. An eternal force, migration has a severing effect on families even though it may shape and expand the lives of both migrants and those staying behind. My work attempts to explore the topic of family separation, examining how families and personalities change as a result of time, economic opportunity, distance, and culture.

/Bio

An-My Lê

/Statement

An-My Lê is an artist whose photographs of landscapes transformed by war or other forms of military activity blur the boundaries between fact and fiction and are rich with layers of meaning. A refugee from Vietnam and resident of the United States since 1975, much of Lê’s work is inspired by her own experience of war and dislocation. From black and white images of her native Vietnam taken on a return visit in 1994 to pictures of Vietnam War battle reenactments in rural America, her photographs straddle the documentary and the conceptual, creating a neutral perspective that brings the essential ambiguity of the medium to the fore. In her series 29 Palms (2003–2004), Lê documents American soldiers training in a desert in Southern California before their deployment to Iraq. She focuses her camera alternately on young recruits and the harsh terrain in which they practice their drills, lending an obvious artificiality to the photographs that invites speculation about the romance and myth of contemporary warfare. Currently, Lê is documenting the U.S. military’s presence at sites around the world where personnel are undertaking training missions, patrolling international waterways, and offering humanitarian aid. An additional series in progress explores the ongoing ties between Vietnamese nationals who have migrated to southern Louisiana over the past twenty-five years and their homeland in the Mekong Delta. An-My Lê received B.A.S. (1981) and M.S. (1985) degrees from Stanford University and an M.F.A. (1993) from Yale University. Since 1998, she has been affiliated with Bard College, where she is currently a professor in the Department of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Dia: Beacon; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. In 2012, Lê was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in recognition of her accomplishments as a photographer and her contributions to the evolution of the medium.

Soi Park's photographs describe a patchwork of landscapes assembled from interconnected lives and bridged distances. She approaches her subjects as mysterious intersections of global economics, immigration mazes, emotional ties, and blurred borders. Finishing his meal, a day laborer is suspended in a shaft of cold New England winter sunlight, suspended between jobs, at midday, and mid-life. The portrait, as well as the limitations of portraiture, becomes a thread to follow, a story to unravel and a compass pointing to her next photograph. The man speaks about the family in Ecuador, the faces of his children, and the name of his village. Where another photographer might jot this down in a notebook for use in a possible accompanying text, Soi Park buys a plane ticket to Ecuador. The space between any two of Park's photographs can be as evocative as the pictures themselves. In a world of Google Earth and Facebook albums where there is no substitute for "being there", she is committed to describe the separation and absence through photographs that prove the unique character of a place and the complex reality of her portrait subjects. While the work, at first glance, might appear firmly rooted in a documentary tradition, Park regularly complicates ideas of empathy and vicarious experience. Activism, representation, and social responsibility are simultaneously present and rigorously questioned in Park's working process. If there is a protest at work in these photographs, it is against the cable news sound-bytes, stump speech statistics, and even the well-intentioned clipboard-holding college student trying to connect a New York pedestrian with a hungry child in Africa. While covering enormous ground (Poland, Sweden, Israel, Ecuador, Brooklyn...), Park always works at a human scale to evoke the powerful currents of desire, risk, and consequence. She describes the path from the home a person is born into to the place they cobble together for themselves.

Soi Park

Home/Alone: Photographs by Soi Park By Kelly Cannon

It is hard to imagine the Yale-trained photographer Soi Park sharing tequila with strangers at a day labor pick-up location in Connecticut. Yet that is how she became acquainted with the workers, and subsequently their families, who figure throughout her latest body of work. While she was riding on the Metro North commuter line in August of 2010, the train stopped briefly outside Stamford, giving Park a view of men loitering in a nearby lot. As the train started up again, she watched them run toward an arriving van. The anomaly of the men’s urgency within the nondescript setting led her to return to the site with a camera. Over the course of several months photographing at the lot, she came to know the men, who were day laborers living in America and accepting odd jobs to support their families in Central and South America. They gradually welcomed her, sharing their stories and family snapshots. These were personally resonant for Park: when she was nine years old, her father left their home near Seoul, South Korea, in search of work in the United States. She followed in 2005 at age 27. Photographs sent between her father and mother in the intervening years were their most tangible form of contact. Park’s photographs address the sense of displacement she feels as a foreigner and seeks in her subjects. In the series Where Are We Going?, begun in 2007 and completed in 2010 during her first year in the Yale School of Art’s MFA program, people move through parking lots and fields on the outskirts of postindustrial Northeastern towns or are framed by the equipment of transportation. In an untitled work from 2010, a figure is caught climbing over a fence that separates railroad tracks from a cluster of clapboard houses beyond. The houses

Home/Alone: Photographs of Soi Park

appear as an arrangement of sloping roofs, sharply outlined windows, and oblique shadows that oscillates between geometric order and incoherence. Plots of overgrown weeds extend behind the figure; there is no train in sight. It is unclear how this person arrived there, but certain that this is not where he or she belongs. Many of the landscapes in the series are transitional sites like this one, where the psychology of the outsider is manifested in the indistinct layering of surface and depth, which complicates spatial organization. The limited palette of a black and white print adds to the disorientation. At times, the distance or height of the camera in Where Are We Going? lends a furtive quality to the images, as if the photographer—like her subjects—were trying to remain unseen. At the same time, the calibrated combination of strobe and natural light attests to Park’s preparation. This ambiguous mix of reality and choreography may recall the work of predecessors such as Gregory Crewdson and Jeff Wall, who use the tools of the studio to construct—and conceal the mechanisms behind—elaborately staged tableaux. For the photograph Men Waiting (2006), a particularly relevant instance, Wall hired nearly 20 day laborers to stand in a re-created pick-up location for hours at a time over the course of several weeks as he waited for the ideal atmospheric conditions and mood. Like Wall, Park paid the day laborers she photographed for the series Buscar Trabajo— Looking for Work (2010–2011), in which the men act out scenarios she imagined her father had experienced as a day laborer. Though Park freely admits to directing elements of her photographs, her images speak to a collaboration between the artist and subject that differs greatly from that of Wall’s precisely controlled projects. Rather than posing as archetypes in Wall’s compositions, which evoke historical painting, or playing a role in Crewdson’s quasicinematic productions, the day laborers are both “being themselves” and attempting to fulfill the artist’s projection of a loved—albeit distantly perceived—family member. The photographs in Buscar Trabajo—Looking for Work have a rawness that derives from the meeting between the artist’s vision and the day laborers’ individual realities of life apart from their families. The men’s tentative body language and facial expressions testify to the difficulty of conjuring these private emotions. Achieving the ideal representation is not her goal. Staging is merely one tool in a multipart process that interweaves narrative, artistic intention, and participation. This is even more true of Park’s current series. While photographing Manuel, a day laborer in Connecticut, for Buscar Trabajo—Looking for Work, Park learned about his family, which remains in Sigsig, a small canton in his native Ecuador. Manuel sends money home to educate his children, the youngest of whom has 26

never met him, and for the ongoing construction of a new house, one of many in the region similarly financed. Recalling the mementos sent back and forth during her own family’s separation, Park proposed traveling between Manuel’s apartment in the United States and his Ecuadorian home to photograph the family over time. She has visited several times since her first trip in 2011 and plans to return at least once more to take pictures of the family as the children grow. The photographs of Manuel and his family shed the restless density of Park’s earlier work. Muted light visually links the images made in Danbury, Connecticut, with those in Sigsig, creating an underlying atmosphere of stillness that is sustained by uncluttered compositions. The transition from foreground to background is resolved, and figures occupy clearly delineated spatial registers. A recurring pose in which each figure looks beyond the frame further connects the family members. We are led to ponder: are they daydreaming about each other? Whereas Park used disorientation to convey displacement in her earlier photographs, in these works she employs formal cohesion to engineer a reunion—albeit a visual, not physical, one. Recently Park extended her project to Ewa, a woman who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and has known Park for six years. Ewa won the green card lottery to stay in the U.S. in 2005 and, since 2007, has not had the opportunity to see her family in Kopiec, Poland. Park offered to travel to Kopiec to take photographs of them; she made her first trip in 2012 and intends to return there soon. The pictures, shot in Brooklyn and Poland, show a more directorial approach. In one image from 2012, Ewa’s mother stands outdoors at a short distance from her house and looks back through the window to the interior, from which the camera—and, later, the viewer—looks out at her. In another photograph (also 2012), the camera now faces a window, where Ewa is revealed to be looking out from a position similar to the one held by Park when she shot the previous image in Kopiec. Though Ewa is in New York—the different frames underscore separate locations—the images together create a situation in which the family members, Ewa’s like Manuel’s, seem to engage despite their true separation. Window framing emphasizes the photographic conceit and evokes the printed photograph as the tangible instrument of family connection. Indeed, in Park’s photograph of Manuel’s apartment in Connecticut, a print of her earlier portrait of his family lies among his belongings as evidence of this exchange in reality. In the current exhibition, pictures taken in Israel, Sweden, and Germany join the series of family photographs. Three compositions shot in Israel in 2011 and 2012 represent, in 27

part, a continuation of Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s earlier concern with depicting transitional sites. One shows a playground in central Tel Aviv in which refugees from South Sudan and Eritrea sleep at night among the childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rides and bright lights. A photograph from Jerusalem, in which a mattress, complete with linens and a pillow, lies outside in broad daylight, is at once absurd and disturbing: does this become someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bed at night? Having used her camera elsewhere as a tool for intimate interventions, here Park presses her investigation of placelessness to a pitch that is at once passionately empathetic and quietly political.

Kelly Cannon recently received her bachelor’s degree in Art History from

This essay was written as part of the Young Art

Yale University. She lives in New York City and is a Curatorial Assistant for

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the International Center of Photography’s Fourth Triennial of Photography

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Association of Art Critics) and CUE Art Foundation, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a

Marcia E. Vetrocq is an art historian and author, who has written for

specific exhibiting artist.

the magazines Art in America (where she was editor-in-chief 2008–11), Modern Painters, Art + Auction, and Arts. She has contributed to exhibition

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Dear Home

1. Untitled (Ewa's mother), 2012. Archival pigment print, 44" x 35.5" 2. Untitled (Ewa Zyskowska, Brooklyn, New York), 2012. Archival pigment print, 44" x 35.5" 3. Untitled (Ewa's father-in-law), 2012. Archival pigment print, 44" x 35.5" 4. Untitled (Family on a break from farm, Kopiec, Poland), 2012. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 5. Untitled (Ewa Zyskowska, Brooklyn, New York), 2011. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 6. Untitled (Empty house in Kopiec, Poland), 2012. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 7. Untitled (Manuel's youngest daughter, Carmen), 2012. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 8. Untitled (Manuel Britto and room, Danbury, Connecticut), 2010. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 9. Untitled (Manuel's wife, Zoila Marin), 2011. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 10. Untitled (Manuel Britto, Danbury, Connecticut), 2012. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 11. Untitled (Manuel Britto's room, Danbury, Connecticut), 2012. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 12. Untitled (Manuel's older daughter, Diana), 2011. Archival pigment print, 44" x 35.5" 13. Untitled (The view from the balcony, Sigsig, Ecuador), 2011. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 14. Untitled (Playground at night, Tel Aviv, Israel), 2011. Archival pigment print, 46.5" x 60" 15. Untitled (Negev Desert, Israel), 2012. Archival pigment print, 35.5" x 44" 16. Untitled (Empty bed, Jerusalem, Israel), 2012. Archival pigment print, 44" x 29.5"

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cueartfoundation.org CUE Art Foundation 137West 25th Street (between 6th and 7th avenues) New York, NY Catalog: elizabeth ellis design Printing: GM Printing, LIC All artwork © Soi Park

Major Programmatic Support

Accademia Charitable Foundation, Ltd., CAF American Donor Fund, The Viking Foundation, AG Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Compass Equity, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Greenwich Collection, Ltd., Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, William Talbot Hillman Foundation, The Hyde and Watson Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts (a state agency). media sponsor:

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