Everything in its right place: 박주연

For the past five years I have mainly been working with ephemeral materials and situations that I encounter while strolling along streets. In the process I have been connecting singular experiences, perspectives and ideas, operating on a small scale in the margins everywhere in our society. It usually starts out from the simplest objects, from everyday situations, basic banalities and I try to find the energy in the absolute detail of things to bring out unnoticed social relations and meanings. I constantly quest for simplicity and formal harmony aiming for an artwork that neither assault eye nor feelings. Video shots while strolling through urban areas, for example Parachute Walk (2001) and Forget me not (2000) condense the permanent flow of my everyday perception of objects and events. Forget me not is a story of an old lady who has been living in an old Ford Consul in a leafy area of London for almost 30 years. Her resistance to all attempts to move her into more comfortable accommodation has reinforced questions that I had been questioning in my work for sometime. Where does one define as ‘home’ and how free are we of locating it within dominant social system? What are the links with the individual, society, and culture? Ever since I had moved to London at the age of 15, I have been going through a time of leaving and readapting into different social arrangements, lifestyles, relationships, languages, domestical patterns, ego, identities, and institutional organizations. Constant mobility under the influences of authoritarian and utilitarian forces challenges one’s sense of everydayness, a sense of reality. Rhyme (2002), an extensive inventory of disposable packages that I collected from the streets of London, exhibited at the Insa Art Space of the Korean Culture and Art foundation in Seoul in 2002 problematized the idea of the everydayness that I had taken for granted for over a decade. Despite of the length of time I had spent in the London city, dislocated from its origin they have become a collection of tourist’s souvenir like objects. Its contextual shifts caused by physiological and psychological displacements have brought me series of research questions. How does the physiological and psychological shifts effect everyday perception, place and presence? Instead of dwelling on refusal from the society how does one as an artist/researcher navigate and interrelate heterogeneous and fragmented factors experienced in-between different systems and dominant meanings in order to carry out productive artistic activities? How does one sustain one’s intimacy and personal attachment of everyday/reality experience under the condition of mobility imposed by contemporary society?

 

 

 

Ephemeral traces within void

Eunju Lee 2004 

 

In her previous works, Jooyeon Park has consistently shown interests in objects existing in a void, objects with broken relationships, such as thrown out Christmas trees, discarded rubbishes on the streets, or coin lockers in underground stations. This is evident in her previous work Untitled (2002) where social relationships are put in a non-hierarchical state where letters have been removed from street sign boards, creating anonymous locations as a result. If her previous works captured the point where ties between an individual and object are lessened, her recent works deal with the way an individual creates one's own way of existing within a void space. This attitude is placed on a prolongation of her video work Forget me not (2000), a story of an old lady named Ann Smith who has lived in a Ford Consul for almost 30 years, creating an authentic 'home' in an leafy area in London. 

Aluminum makeshift structures, benches, mats, and pyungsang (a wooden table that Koreans use as a seat) in her recent works do not completely expand into personal domain, but all temporary as if to act as temporary stations. These 'empty spaces' within a firm systematical framework are for short rests in-between drifts. People throw their belongings on a bench or a mat beside the river, and enjoy a brief moment of rest, then return to their city lives once again. Unstable and ephemeral traces of belongings laid down in-between their drifts are differently expressed according to individuals. The aluminum houses such as Shoe repair house and Guard house, constituting the main story in her recent works are spaces where an individual physically stays, lives and works in, with no permanence guaranteed, with a possibility of being removed by the authoritarian force anytime. These aluminum shelters in her recent works are created in one-third of the typical dimension seen on the street, minimizing monumentality, emphasizing inconsequential existence isolated from a dominant society. The metal poll placed along side her temporary house also marks its own territory temporarily yet rightfully, expressing its own existence.  

What Jooyeon Park constantly captures is ephemeral traces that we pass by rather than how a certain space is occupied. Her attachment to fragile existences is also evident in her previous works, Rhyme (2002) and Parachute walk (2001). In her recent video work White on White (2004), instead of capturing a vivid energy at the construction site where things are built and structured, she quietly records a fragile and poetic aspect of a temporary state of a construction site. In this way, her works do not insist their rights, but encounters ephemeral traces, and introduces 'relocation', rather than 'possession'. The aluminum shelters, metal poll, benches, mats, and sky with glimpse of dragon flies passing away continue their fragile stories in void spaces excluded from the domain cityscape. Alive, yet inconsequential, constantly expressing its own right, neither spectacle nor loud, but firmly standing in its right place resembles the artist herself.