PARK KWANG-SUN

Park Kwang-sun is a graduate of the Department of Painting at the Chugye University for the Arts. He has held solo exhibitions at Artertain and Artnoid178 and participated in numerous group exhibitions at the Yeongdeungpo Cultural Foundation, Sejong Center, Gallery Gwak, Artertain, Artnoid178, and Studio126. He has been an artist in residence at the Hue+ Network Art Studio since 2019.
Park paints portraits—or rather, he blots them out. His portraits on plywood permeate the distinctive roughness and desiccation of their surfaces as soon as they are drawn. The artist&s gaze lingers on plywood (abandoned plywood, at that), canvas as of yet striking him as an overly sleek form of material. Virtually the only backdrop that Park has chosen to use since his early years, plywood is here taken as an entity of devotion and self-sacrifice, employed and cast aside at the whims of some sort of utility and yet reluctant to put itself forward and instead keeping itself hidden. Park tears away the edges of the plywood to give it a human outline and proceeds to paint on it portraits of himself, his closest acquaintances, and his family members. These individuals surface after having churned their way through through the artist&s memories before they once again submerge, wordlessly obscuring their bodies and slowly dissipating from view. By enshrouding or blotting out the persons whom he portrays, the artist himself thus undoes the traces of the loss and desolation which derive from the rift between reality and recollection.

Submitted by KAMS - Korean Arts Management Service