Park Ido: A Thousand Gardens

Chapter II announces A Thousand Gardens, a solo exhibition of works by Park Ido from 17th August to 23rd September in the Yeonnam-dong space, Seoul. Park Ido has been committed to overlaying a new plot over the appearances of presented targets through pictorial attempts encompassing various media. In this exhibition, he unveils the outcome of experiments in his intrinsic methodology of dealing with the objects for depiction between two antipodal activities, creation and appreciation.

 

“To see is to have at a distance (Voir c'est avoir à distance)”, a sentence by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), sounds like a manifesto delivering his profound insight into the fate of painters. What painters depict includes the objects per se and immaterial elements outside human visual perception, such as light, temperature, seasons, emotions and time. Thus, to transcend a thing into a theme, they tend to come up with ‘a probable phenomenal world’, where these invisible features construct themselves on a two-dimensional surface.

 

When the universal sizes of objects are decided based on the viewers' prior experiences, artists can control them with their creative motive, taking human scale as a standard. Barnett Newman (1905–1970) encouraged spectators to look at his works within a meter when they appreciated the series of ‘Onement.’ It implies that Newman wished that the visitors encountered a phenomenon overwhelming their sight with a sublime originating from his huge paintings rather than receiving them as mere broken images.

 

Yet, the compositions adopted by Park respect the common viewpoint and attitude towards flowers. For example, in the series of Wonder Gardens (2023), the array of flower buds unfolding from the vertical center has a familiar scale and a universal layout of practically landscaping garden paths. With the given title, the intention of applying 'the means to possess a garden' to his painting style plays a role in preventing the new series more abstract than his prior approach from detaching from the realm of figurative painting.

 

Not only increasing a sense of abstraction, but Park Ido also embraces invisible factors, such as air density, humidity, and the intensity of radiation, in his practice to create a dreamlike ambience and depth by efficiently employing the layers caused by materialistic properties the dominant medium of this exhibition, wax. Besides, the actual thickness of the surface arouses a new inspiration by simulating tactile sensation and gives the fresh effect of perspective over the possibly monotonous plane.

 

The exhibition title, ‘A Thousand Gardens’, suggests a potential that the result of Park’s imagination that grew in his studio can be valid for any garden in the world. In this context, what he attempts to express could be each individual’s recollections manifested as diverse sensitivities of flowers and plants we all have come across in a garden. Memories conveyed as only abstract words in a common circumstance are too obscure to specify despite a long gaze and, therefore, they are likely to remain a subject of admiration; however, we would reencounter them through the beautiful beeswax landscapes by Park Ido at a distance.

 

Park Ido (b.1983) received a BFA from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art et de Design de Dijon and a MFA from Haute école des arts du Rhin in France. He had participated  exhibitions at Incheon Art Platform (2020), Moran Museum of Art (2018), Chang Ucchin Museum of Art Yangju City (2017), Platform-L Contemporary Art Center (2017), Academie des Beaux-arts (2012) and more.