Park Hye Soo: CHAPTER II WINDOW | Goodbye to Love I - Light of Illusion

Hye Soo Park explores each individual's life and value steadily disappearing in the group consciousness of the present era. Since 2013, she has collected breaking-up stories of common people and objects related to them. Her work Goodbye to Love I – Lights of Illusion was initiated by the moment when Park coincidently purchased a thousand pieces of folded-paper cranes, which was a present from someone's ex-partner, for six thousands won through an online secondhand shopping site.

“The value of old love fallen into a price for a meal reminds me of the answers of many people who said that they can give up on their relationships due to practical reasons. For the reality, the people are losing themselves by abandoning dreams, leaving their love behind and cutting off the contact with their families...” (Hye Soo Park)

Goodbye to Love I has been displayed in various presentation styles at multiple locations including Castle Oud-Rekem in Belgium, since 2013 at Museum of Art, Seoul National University. In the Chapter II Window space, she transformed it in a large scale piece reaching the size of 520cm in width and 230cm in height by attaching 5,000 units of paper cranes. The golden wrinkled papers glittering with sunshine and artificial light occupied the entire window; they manifested an illusion of dazzling love and reality that nothing remained but a painful wound. Next to the installation, there was a box of a wedding watch that one woman has treasured for a while after her divorce as she had a strong attachment to it rather than the wedding watch. This signifies the fantasy of the marriage life itself covered under a surface overweighed a sense of disappointment occurred by a divorce and a marriage life without love.

By arraying common memories and sentiments that ordinary people often come across, Hye Soo Park encourages people to reflect upon their own life, others around them and the relationship with them in a contemporary circumstance where individual values fade away and a certain essence is neglected due to social norms and standardized meanings of happiness.