Simple and Plain Pictures during the Age of Opulence

Simple and Plain Pictures during the Age of Opulence are the Reason Why I love Works of Shin-Hye Park

Kang , Sung-Won/Art Critic

1. A concept and theory are intrinsically ideological.

They are true in one respect but false when observed from the other side. This view has haunted me recently and I plan to think about it further.

People have produced durable materials (e.g., nylon) in a more improved manner as time goes by, materials that last long and do not wear out easily. And it is said that the future is becoming more and more an age of design. Designs generate a desire for consumption. I am told that it takes quite a while for plastic things, things made to last long, to wear out completely in this world; how can I discard them well if I am going to replace them with the newly designed materials? My unwillingness to discard them causes a confusion in the midst of abundance, which, I turn, boggles my mind.

That which is abundant fatigues me. In this world it is hard for many things to disappear. A4coordingly, fruits of consciousness are plentiful. Falsehood and truth grow abundantly while it is getting harder and harder for the two to disappear. Isn't there a way for them to disappear beautifully and completely? I admit my fear that only the complexity of my consciousness, after my death, might continue to stay and disturb the society.

... It is true that, by nature, oil paintings, Installations and object art contained too many strong and uncomfortable ideas and feelings. I was never convinced that such fact conveyed one distinct meaning. A certain feeling is, however, aroused while studying the works of Shin-Hye Park. An apprehension is awakened: the central genre of the present day world of paintings has been, and more so recently, a mountain of the expressions of unprofitable and unpleasant consciousness or of only the mental and psychological reflections of the masses upon their own desires. These are filled with feelings of joy, anger, sorrow and/or pleasure, and they are the very desires that have become from any angle disgusted, distorted, and ferocious. So, it has become clear that they are the products of viral knowledge and senses which are filled, like the garbage of a hospital, with filth and medicinal trash.

Could it be that Minimalism probably owes to such feeling, regardless of its ideological basis, its lasting attraction that arouses interests in the mind of people simply through its visible images? However, could Minimalism be a face of complicated ideas with an image of simplicity? What other name could be used for a picture when produced by an image that is based on the most plain feelings and ideas, if it is not Minimalism?

Presently my mind aspires after simplicity. Is such an aspiration an impulse of the moment that merely passes? Will anyone love the drawings on the basis of a sheer impulse with a good reason-nothing but a peace fitting for a condition of awareness that is wearied by a culture? World peace may be only a compromised moment of standstill in the midst of disturbance, caused by conflicts of awareness: thus, if there is no true peace, then are the works of Shin-Hye Park nothing but a naïve story that adorns the tranquility of the moment?

2. If a process that marks off a vast space, creating new spaces and dividing them into small rooms, is the process of knowledge and industry, then the drawing world of Shin-Hye Park is said to be a process of erasing such partitioned spaces, divisions of ideologies, and mediating point of consciousness.

It is claimed that the more she erases, the more a resemblance to nature appears, and from the erased partitions emerges equability of feeling, not of ideology. It has a feeling of emptying the heart which is being erased just like innumerable memories, including human footprints. That has been erased from slit on the seashore. The opulent image she wishes to convey is a scene of simple human being who resembles a refreshing sea fragrance coming from that erased space of the emptied heart.

She seems to have chosen the charcoal work, because it is the most basic way of creating the type of drawings that she wants. Charcoal enables her to draw impromptu her ideas and feeling without a serious attempt to untangle their skeins.

She believes that abundance and diversity are things that form and disappear naturally. In fact, such interpretations and explanations do not do justice to her pictures. To that extent, her drawings endeavor to be pictures of a small epic of many a year ago.

There is, however, a certain movement in her small epics. It moves towards to ideology. It is a combination of the movement of a spatial horizon that attempts to open spatial closure and of the axis of the depth. The movement is not, in fact, visible to all, but anyone who is able to enter into her picture and, thus, into that equability senses the door. A knob of door is not presented, but people who group and attempt to open the door will find an interest in her drawing.

3. People in the world live with different horizons and contents of their own awareness. These horizons provide a space for each individual to join others of like mind: however this space is falsified from the axis of the principle that the world revolves. And in this space people move while maintaining a relationship between a total of their own space and a part of others. Within this space, individuals discover their own vitality relevant to them from a certain facet.

Numerous contents and forms of culture are an expression of this vitality. Is it not possible for the vitality and spaces to achieve, by their own autonomy, a sufficient actualization to have, for example, a flower burst into full bloom? It is, in the present life, the power of capital which makes such vitality to be a real vitality while approving it. It is within such a society that the capital guarantees the realization.

When her pictures are evaluated with such a value system, the charcoal drawings are not professional. The reason for this is because charcoal drawings, differing from oil paintings, appear to be picture with light touches and fewer complexes, when compared to the works of general Installations.

Her pictures, however, by no means hide a false awareness in the simplest sense of the term. She does not wear a mask: sometimes artists themselves are not aware of these masks. Judging from this perspective, her drawings are indeed professional. She seems to be achieving a Minimalism that is grounded upon the awareness of something definitely ordinary, rather than upon images.

The task of our cultural world is that an interpretation of the values of this cultural activity has to be genuinely more exquisite and professional. These ideas came to mind as I was studying her works. They probably arouse from my concern about the current situation of the world of culture. Having been someone who wishes to see definite opportunities continually provided to face calmly people and situations as well as pictures, I confronted such a moment of opportunity when I viewed her works. With a hope for all things to be done in the right way, I cherish in my heart the recollection of the silt by a certain seashore that she has shown.

Park Shin-Hye— A Neutral Scenery

The work of Park Shin-Hye remains in solitude and quiescence. On the canvas silence, tranquillity, and simplicity delicately vibrates alone. Her charcoal drawing stays on the tissues of the canvas in a simple quiet manner. It merely displays clouds, the sea water line, sea weeds, and the likes. In the midst of that serenity the sky, clouds, and sea are placed, revealing only a minimum of their signs. A purpose of reproduction and time controlled by a form cannot be discovered. Could this be the reason why objects like clouds, the sky, and sea which demonstrate their existence in an innocent calm, appear to be strange and even heartless, creating suddenly an unrealistic feeling? That heartlessness seems to be the result of her serene perceiving eyes when dramas and feelings are removed. Rather, it is an impression of such boring objects which usually do not rouse any feeling to warrant a special observation. Since the sky and the sea themselves occasionally appear in various forms and suddenly turn to different images the artist does not need to express them in a different way to satisfy her intention, rather she appears to be merely following the course while committing her body and mind to the changes. I am led to believe that her work reveals an experience of unrealistic world in a real world. This drawing, which follows the expression of nature, did not need to forge anything nor show any intent, but has grown to be a picture without any excess to the artist. This seems to be precisely the core of Park Shin-Hye’s works. She might have chosen nature in order to draw what is free from overabundance. In the midst of the multiplication of dreadful desires of modern art, which is stuffed with overflowing intentions and opinions, logic and expressions, I am suddenly encountered with a work that has erased such ideologies and theories. The distillation of consciousness and absence of superfluity are approaching us as the primary characteristics of the works of this artist. This is, as Kang Sung Won has observed, “it is Minimalism based upon, not an image, but the consciousness of a definite daily experience.” Pictures liberated from a complex of intentions and a heavy weight of difficult mind, such works are Park Shin Hye’s. For Park Shin-Hye an artistic expression, e.g., a drawing, is “an act of confirming human cognizance that is made possible through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling ceaselessly in everyday life.” “What is especially important in my works is” she said, “how I have progressed to know nature.” This is the case, she continues, because “Nature is a starting point of understanding about life, humanity, and something called living as one experiences.” She affirms further, “It is also a place for an empirical, not ideological, understanding of God.” And here, nature is chosen not as a mere object that approaches demanding a reappearance of the tenacious present reality but as an agent to expose her unique experience of nature, namely, the unrealistic image of the world


Park Young Tack/Arts Critic, Kyung Kee University

An artist who unleashes the principles of creation the tip of the brush - Shin-Hye Park

There is an artist who expresses the vision of heaven, earth, and sea, and the moving creatures on the ground in between, on the canvas temperately and calmly th the utmost. ...

There is a person who is devoted to drawing the image of the nature in its ancient form, the form before the fabrication of man with endless attemts.
Artist Park, Shin Hye. She has come to maturity in her 20 years of artist career and she still continues to be active inher career. How exhausted we are from so many messages and ideology, and pouring information through mass media and yet her masterpiece presents the genuine rest to us.
The blank space with the profound meaning in every serene masterpiece owns the image of touching painful scar and healing it by forces of the untamed nature and it moves our heart with compassion. Her masterpieces often found in charcoal drawing are brief yet intense which embraces something beyoundour expression....

Her masterpiece is natural. Her masterpiece is like her informal and without fabricatedf appearance. The plain simple blank space in her masterpiece gives such a natural feeling? What is the meaning of natural feeling. If you give it a dictionary definition, it could mean without fabrication, without force and without feeling awkward. As we keep think about the saying without fabrication and without feeling awkward, it draws a question. We fabricate to achieve the greater beauty. But by doing so we could also create the awkward feeling. One cannot fathom the reason for a tree to be standing where it is, why endless sand fields are spread in front of a magnificent ocean, or why a pitiful insert try so hard to get out of cocoon to see the world, because those are the works of the Creator. The movement of the nature which strives for the returning to the beginning of the world is beautiful, because it contains the 'beauty of the nature'. Let us empty our self desires and take a close look at her works again. You will find her sincere world dazzling before your eyes where she restrain herself from the urge of stroking once more. Like the soil that filters out the contaminated water into pure living water, we have much anticipation for her next year's exhibition that it will give use the way to clear our mind with the peculiar naturalism that she brings.

- Reporter Kyung-Hi Han, La vie en reve, Jan & Feb 2004