Byoung Choon Park

Byoung-Choon Park (Bron 1966, Chungcheongbuk-do, Young-dong) Korean Painter. Park Byung Choon refers to the theme focused on the modernization of Korean painting, and he has been experimenting with various meaningful trial and error processes throughout his career. And now we have the privilege of looking at the traces of this time. However, this doesn’t mean that we should think of it as a mainstream artists’retrospective exhibition since Park’s experimenton the forms in Korean painting is an ongoing project. This will be confirmed again through this exhibition. Therefore, in this sense, the theme, ““landscapecollection”” impliesan interim examination on his experimentation with new possibilities in Korean painting. This exhibition combines aspects of all those experiments. Whether by intention or not, the featured series of new works are founded upon the aspects de

veloped in earlier works, hinting that from the stepping stone of his long experience, another experiment may begin.

Therefore, it is probably right to begin with a brief sketch of his previous works. First of all, one should notice that the most noticeable feature in his painting is the gradation of his brush strokes. In terms of Chinese ink gradation, Park tends to choose only one type of shade at a time: for instance, if he chose to use heavy shaded Chinese ink for a painting, he would keep painting the picture with that shade until he finished. Likewise, if he chose to go with light shade ink, he would exclusively employ a light shade until that portion was completed. As a result, in his painting, more emphasis is placed on his distinctive brush strokes than on the effect of the ink gradation.And this is probably related to why the combination of parallel brush strokes This is different from overlapping the brush strokes since he doesn’t ink over the brush strokes. maximizesvisual effect and in some cases why sometimes his works arereminiscent of unrestrained drawing works. Again, since brush stroke lies at the core of

his work, the artist challenges himself to find a way to create a unique brush stroke for his paintings, and as a result, the ‘Ramen brush stroke’ came to be.

Ramen brush strokes arebrush strokes that simply recall Ramen’s windy lines, create the shapes of mountains and fields, and the monotone shade and uniformed brush strokes accentuate the two dimensionality of the painting. As we follow those zigzag lines, it gives an illusion like feeling as if we could find some hidden forms that these strokes had drawn a veil over. As a matter of fact in Korean tradition the standard of great landscape painting is the capacity of the painting to cause its viewer to desire to explore the represented scenery. Even if there is no human figure depicted in the painting, if the scenery causesthe viewer to desire to walk in some place like that or even to craft an illusion that he or she is actually living inside the picture, the work was considered ideal.

In other words, this can be described as work that exists in the realm of the ideal, which from a contemporary perspective would be considered to be from the realm of the allusive. Indeed, in Park Byung Choon’s work, we find a more ambitious and direct realization of this kind of idealistic and allusive self-projection. For instance, he sometimes draws himself and his family into his landscapes. He also adds some descriptions of the realities of his own life, memories and desires. Sometimes the scenery of a friend’s wedding that he went to on his way to his sketch trip appears; sometimes several scenes of the incidents from the newspapers he read in the morning come outin the painting. A yellow sofa, a red postbox, bananas and a watermelon are included in the scenery. These objects come into the landscape and have a logical probability, or can be something that just come into the artist’s mind by chance. The present and the past, the ideal and the real and the private, such as a friend’s wedding, and the public, such as newspaper articles, become the reality of the particular moment come alive in his painting. The artists’ projection of himself into his work like this is a new phenomenon in Korean landscape painting. Therefore, this kind of practice might be seen as the beginning of a shift in the substance of Korean landscape painting.

The artist has been experimenting in this way throughout his practice, always finding new starting points for each work. Such a tendency continues in his recent works. For example, Landscape in My Memory, ‘Cloudy Landscape, Dreamy Landscape,Collected Shan Sui, Black Landscape, Unfamiliar Scenery, Streaming Landscape, Grazing Landscape, Blackboard Landscape, Piled Up Landscape, Rubber Landscape and Ramen Landscape are recent works that were derived from such an approach. These titles might be just rhetoric expressions, but they contain a semantic purpose and explain how each landscape came to be. For example, Landscape in My Memory is connected to Cloudy Landscape and Dreamy Landscape. The reason these landscapes are blurry and dreamy is because they were retrievedfrom memories.

In these works, based on real-life sketches, Park Byung Choon,piled up the motifs he recalls from his own memories. The results are shown in Collected Shan Shui Of course, there is no such thing as a yellow sofa or a red postbox in the real outdoors. Yet the viewer can still enjoy the landscape as if he or she is sitting in the sofa: the painting invites us to look at the landscape from the placewhere the border between the scenery and real life is eliminated. In Black Landscape the artist emphasizesthe contrast between trees in black silhouette and the road expressed in the empty space of the picture, and inUnfamiliar Scenery he contains the throbbing heart we experience when confronted with an unfamiliar landscape. This landscape changes to a streaming landscape as water flows and then passesas if we see it from a car window. Maybe this is why we paint landscape paintings. Because we desire to freeze in time an ephemeral experience of scenery such as streaming water or passing scenery.

These landscapes pause in the middle of streaming or passing, especially the landscape that is looked downfrom Jeju Oreum, produces somewhat remote and sad sentiments. Meanwhile, the Blackboard Landscape recalls the sand pictures of Zen Buddhist monks or that of Indio somehow. In this work, he erased a painting that he did on the blackboard with his spirit therefore, this landscape is more than just a painting, but rather it works as an act of self-cultivation as that of the Buddhist monks. In the Piled up Landscape, by including a mural landscape in another space he tried to stretch the boundaries of landscape painting. Along with those landscape works, the artist tries to combine landscape painting with the grammar of object and readymade through Rubber Landscape and Ramen Landscape. In particular, in Ramen Landscape, which was done in a manner of installation art, he tried to undo landscape painting by merging it with a discourse of everyday life that contains epistemological references to art and everyday
life, and by bridging the boundary between fiction and everyday life.

One thing we should notice in his recent works is how Park has started to use images captured from Google Earth. As we know Google Earth images are aerial photographs, and the viewpoint of these images can be somewhat similar to ‘Boogambup’ (bird’s eye view method) in Korean painting terms but when looking into details, they are, fundamentally different. Although the artist has applied a view from above in his paintings before, looking down from mountain tops, this is the first time for him to take a completely aerial view something that would be basically impossible unlesshe used aerial images such as those provided by Google Earth. Since the perspective of these paintings take a directly downward aerial view, the flatness of the painting is maximized, this again illustrates a visual effect that stresses the flatness of the artist’s works.

Hence, one might wonder to what extent Park’s landscape works can take us in to a sort of virtual reality. It may be too early to make a conclusion here, but it seems quite possible that this encounter with Google Earth may bring some new beginning to the artist’s perspective of landscape painting. Since his strict rule about real life sketching has been loosened up by using images or circumstances with images provided through an intermediary, he may begin to borrow such images more actively in his work. Or at least those two methods might be used at the same time. In any case, it might be a coincidence that he started utilizing an intermediary in his production process, but in fact it might have happened in the course of his conscious or unconscious self-awakening process pertaining to the contemporary mechanism where images are produced, made available and consumed. Yet if the paintings made with Google Earth are enabling him to expand his viewpoint he also is seeking to expand the space of the two dimensional paintings to that of installation work. Through various three dimensional objects, and a series of installation works Park has tested thepossibility of exhibition space by including the space itself as one of the main components of the work can be a good example of this.

One installation work, for example, is his Plastic Bag Landscape. This is a work consisting of black plastic bags piled up in various sizes on the floor of the exhibition space, and it creates a great diversity in form and figure. Each figure is different from another. In this work, viewers can see real landscape-like components: a steep or gentle slope, various sizes of canyons, mountain peaks and cliffs. Sometimes the lighting creates an unexpected contrast between shiny areas and shadowed areas due to the reflective characteristic of plastic. In this way, sometimes it appears like a glossy coal mountain, creating surrealistic atmosphere. In fact, Jeong Seon in Gangwondo province, which is so close to Cheol-Am, Town of Coal Mountains, is one of the places that the artist has visited numerous times. Park has memorized detailed information about the area therefore, it is possible that he might have been impressed by the mountains and was able to make such a work later. In this work, as in Ramen Landscape, he made roads in between the plastic bags and placed miniature houses increasing the realism of the scenery. While Ramen Landscape gives soft, friendly and feminine feelings like those experienced when we look out at a peaceful prairie, Plastic Bag Landscape gives a rough, simple and masculine impression. Thus Park substituted ink and brush with these objects that share a sort of physical similarity with the scenery, and thereby expanded the possibility of his expression.

As mentioned above, the purpose of Blackboard Landscape is related to the artist’s self-cultivation: it is beyond painting. In this work, one probably finds a wittiness and humor. Park used old wooden chairs from an elementary school and movable blackboards. After setting them together facing each other, he drew on the blackboard with chalk. It makes us smile when we imagine how laborious it would have been for the artist, a grown up man, to sit in the small chair and try to cultivate himself by doing a chalk-board landscape. Indeed, humor and wit are not at all a new component in Park’s work. That humor comes into view or sneaks into his work from time to time is a virtue that makes his work more virulent.

One of the objects that the artist often applies in his work is blue packing tape. It started in the experimental stages of Rubber Landscape, plus, it may also have origins in his ideas about bluish green landscape painting. Either way, in his recent work, Park Byung Choon has wrapped the surfaces of a decorative sculpture of a bathing goddess that he picked up from garbage and a long wooden table with blue tape. He placed a stone that resembles the shape of Dokdo (a Korean islet in the East Sea) in the middle of the table, resulting in the image of an island in the middle of a sea. The bathing goddess placed at the edge of this table becomes Venus born out of the ocean as a woman. Maybe Park wanted to express the dramatic moment of myth being born in the middle of a pre-historic ocean. Furthermore, the artist juxtaposes this sculptural object with a painting of an ocean hung on an adjacent wall. Here the real and the imaginary ocean created by the artist contrast each other giving birth to a new narrative, which is different from the myth that is derived from the relationship between a reality and a fiction. If one wants to read the rock on the table as Dokdo, this can also create another narrative. In this way, this work touches the question of multiple narratives that emerge through questions of how to place what; the question of arrangement and placement, and how to read what has been placed the question of understanding and interpretation.

Besides these experiments the artist has exhibited pebbles that he has collected from trips all around the world. In one project he drew a picture on the surface of each pebble and then placed them in transparent boxes as if they were to be displayed at a natural history museum. Each pebble is recorded with detailed information such as origin, date of acquisition, and so on. In this way this work enables us to reconsider monumentality. For example, each pebble has a special meaning to him as one he picked up, one that spent some time with him at a specific place at a time; and is therefore monumental in some sense. Indeed, in general monumentality often involves a grand scale associated with political and historical heroic ideology, so the monumentality that we find from these pebbles may seem meager compared to the general perception of the term. However, it gains its significance from the fact that it is very personal, concrete and earnest. Through this the artist memorializes his journeysand the landscapes he has collected from them.

Finally, for the main part of this exhibition, Park produced an installation of the grand landscape that he saw and felt on his trips to the Himalayas. This is a site-specific work that uses the structures of exhibition space as it is, and in this way Park tries to unite the exhibition spacewith the exhibition display setting. To do this, he did a landscape painting with Chinese ink on the three tall walls that constructed U shape in the space where the first and second floors are connected. And then he installed white cloths from the ceiling to the ground, which are slightly separated from the walls, trying to make the form of waterfalls inside the gallery space. In addition to this, he placed a square shapedwater tank on the floor of the space, put natural rocks in the tank and created the realistic representations of waterfalls. In the water tank, he placed an electronic motor, so that waves could circulate around the draped cloth.

By doing so, all the components of the grand scenery that he had experienced, from the waterfalls represented in white cloths hung from the ceiling, the water pool in the water tank, the waves on the surface of the water, the rocks represented in natural stone and the surrounding background represented in the painting on the walls, become a whole.
This is indeed a nature-like, man-made nature, an imitation of nature, nature in three dimensional objects. Yet the act of reproduction is not the most interesting to the artist here. It is rather the sensation and impression that the artist received by looking at nature. Through this, the artist offers an idea about landscape painting or the landscape that only exists in the realm of painting to the realm of reality, and as the result, the viewer can experience strange yet familiar landscapes in his work.

Park Byung Choon has been combining his two dimensional works with three dimensional objects or site-specific installations. In this way, he has been trying reinterpret the concept of landscape paintings by bringing two dimensional landscapes into three dimensional spaces. He also tried to create anexperimental level that has more reality to it.
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