K.NOTe no.61
Mi Kyoung Park
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K.NOTe no.61
Mi Kyoung Park
Publisher Total Museum Press Pyungchang 32gil 10, Jongno-gu, Seoul Korea (03004) Tel. 82-2-379-7037 total.museum.press@gmail.com Director Jooneui Noh Editor in Chief Nathalie Boseul Shin, Yoon Jeong Koh Coordinator Haeun Lee Intern Jihyun Yoon, Seyeon Kim Designer Flaneur Sponsor Arts Council Korea Date of  Publication May 2019 Š Author and artist The reproduction of the contents of this magazine in whole or in part without written permission if prohibited.
An Obsure island,acrylic on canvas, 160×100, 2014
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An Obsure island,acrylic on canvas, 160×112, 2017
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K.NOTe #61 The Night World without History Jung Hyun Art Critic Park Mi-kyoung’s painting looks like a nightscape. Her painting seems somewhat unrealistic and resembles landscape, but is not a representation of nature. Park’s recent works are dominated by black monochrome whereas her juvenilia verged on a carnival of colors. According to the artist color disappeared in her painting and black - dark shadows and black stains – filled her palette after she underwent a car accident and long-term hospitalization. Restrictions on her body imposed by the accident enabled her to indulge in and wander about the world of reverie: this was perhaps an inevitable demand on her spirit within her physical limits, and struggle to overcome the situation which she could not paint. Uncertainty as the nucleus of communication between abstraction and figuration In Park Mi-kyoung’s painting process is as important as result. At the moment we first meet her painting we may be overwhelmed by the surrealistic scenes with gloomy massiveness. Looking closer, it is possible to realize the seemingly aggressive black scene is a bundle of short lines showing obsessive movement. Has her painting - completed with countless short brushstrokes - to be called abstraction or consequently landscape painting, disregarding all these processes? The artist has not defined her painting in this regard. What elementally she pursues and underscores is a process of form generated by brushwork organically meeting another form. However, it is also said her painting is not like a representation of nature but is reminiscent of some image of a landscape. Irrelevant to her intent, her scenes look like a surrealistic landscape in a fantasy film, and are interpreted in the frame of viewer perception. 8
Oneiric painting without history-repetition and performance Her painting is made up of intermittent lines and repetitive actions as if being conducted in a shamanistic ritual. As mentioned in the beginning, the world Park envisaged in the state of her body paralysis caused by a traffic accident bears resemblance with an unrealistic place and the image that looks like nature appearing when a line meets another line. Her work floating somewhere between abstraction and figuration seems to be her practice of “painting� as a way to stay alive. If we come close to an unrealistic scene that appears realistic, we can realize all is illusion, as if in a fantasy film. As such, we come close to Park’s painting at the moment we realize an abstract scene is created through an overlap of a few lines or brush strokes. My wish is to witness some scenes filled with her fantasies in a panoramic space at her following exhibitions.
An Obsure island,acrylic on canvas,360×130, 2014
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An Obsure island,acrylic on canvas,190×130, 2016
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An Obsure island,acrylic on canvas,190×130, 2014
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An Obsure island,acrylic on canvas,360×130, 2014
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An Obsure island,acrylic on canvas,160×100, 2014
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Mi Kyoung Park Mikyoung Park graduated from Korea National University of Arts and its Graduate School. From her earliest works to the present ones, her paintings have consistently maintained the viewpoint that embraces remnants of collapsed and disintegrated memories without capturing the landscape of reality in a natural way. The large-scale work shown in An Obscure island represents dreamy and confused images that consist of recollections hidden deep inside of one’s mind. It also tries to find sincerity in sufferings of our contemporaries and in harsh realities of life.
Jung Hyun Art critics, professor of department of fine arts, Inha University.
Mi Kyoung Park