The fluttering silver foil you are looking at is a “troublesome meta-material” completely detached from the traditional solidity of canvas or hanji. In this exhibition, Park situates these chaotic, sensorial works within the mutable conditions of an alternative space in Mullae-dong. Interpreting concealed structures of power through an uncanny sensibility, the works unsettle our habituated, disciplined modes of seeing, generating an alternative language that opens artistic “extensions of perception.” As someone who has long questioned the shifting language of creativity within contemporary social structures, the artist points to the reality in which the sensibility of modern individuals—caught between loss and desire—is neatly packaged into aestheticism.
 
The silver-foil series ‘Park’s Memory’ juxtaposes images from the works of canonical masters (now academically worn-out motifs) with various fragments from popular culture, posing the question: “Within a manufactured structure, is your taste truly your own?” Park had already employed the grammar of appropriation aimed at the “sublime object” in his monumental painting series ‘Park’s Park’ (2007–), where images from advertising and pornography were refashioned into Renaissance mythologies. His acute insight into the entanglement of creativity and taste with social contradictions fractures the gaze that has long equated “masterpieces” with the canon.
 
Julia Kristeva (1941–), a poststructuralist who interpreted fissures within the human psyche through figures such as the foreigner, the god, and the monster, defined the sublime not as an object but as a “privation of good,” a dialectic of mania and melancholy. Park’s engagement with nihilistic aesthetics relocates the subjects of his works into “flowing memories,” refusing fixity. These trembling, outline-less memories drift between illusion and the real, extending the discussion towards the question of identity itself.



Partitioned Taste, and a Stone Thrown at Social Contradictions
 
“How is the artist Park Jung-hyuk constituted within cultural power?”

《Flowing Memory》 began as a critique of the power effects embedded in taste. Park’s early works—media installations and performances—were journeys in search of the self within various systems. His life intersected with the identity of “renowned art schools = fashionable work,” and his justified resistance crystallized into observational works grounded in lived reality.

Having grown up in the late 1980s and 1990s, traces of that era surface even in his mother’s pharmacy, “New Daewoo Pharmacy,” reminiscent of the once-aspirational slogan “Global Management = Daewoo.” His identity, formed through the family structure, manifested in works such as 166cm (2004, the artist’s eye-level height—as the highest cry of life, derived from the quantified breath of his bedridden grandmother), and the single-channel video 3 minutes 33 seconds (2004, a metaphor for familial discipline systematized into “a thousand puzzle pieces labeled ‘It’s easy’”).
 
Park’s interest in structural contradictions—originating from family history—expanded into KMDC (2004), a purpose-driven dog contest critiquing the ranking practices of biennales through the classification of abandoned dogs, and Theater Series – 3 minutes 54 seconds (2009), which addressed discipline and social violence. His gaze upon the dilemmas of Korean heroism connects directly to the neoliberal logic that openly suppresses and distorts human creativity. The subjectivity of Park’s Park and Park’s Memory emerges as an alternative language crossing the “canvas as the field of production,” liberating viewers from disciplined perception and restoring a sense of “authentic, personal taste.”
 
In an interview, Park confessed that he “was barely able to work between 2012 and 2017 due to a legal dispute (unfair dismissal) with a certain foundation.”
 
The new narrative structures—balancing popular culture and academic symbolism—operate like a “life performance” entwined with the struggles he has endured. Light yet mutable, they rest on a flexible sensory surface upon which the problem of memory is layered. As events accumulate and reality distorts, the wisdom he gained is clear: art still functions as the counterweight of society.



How to Look at Silver Foil: A Narrative of Memory and Perception
 
When Park abandoned the solidity of canvas and chose silver foil, many questioned issues of preservation. Social anxieties surrounding unfamiliar materials trigger suspicion. Yet no such concerns were raised during the Anselm Reyle exhibition (2013), which used similar materials. The faith placed in globally recognized artists often dissolves doubt through a kind of “cognitive magic.” His fluttering silver-foil works teach us that when perception shifts, phenomena shift as well.
 
By embedding “liquidity” into contemporary sensibilities, the artist underscores process over outcome, insisting that posing questions matters more than arriving at answers. His restrained use of color and emphasis on the trembling, reflective surface of the foil expand interpretive possibilities. The foil’s optical illusions—its refusal to stay fixed—stretch the frame of perception into multiple dimensions.
 
Park’s alternative gaze is magnified in Seven Vertices 1.2 (2015, 2019), a hybrid installation inspired by a tragic death. Mapping the seven locations the deceased visited on their final day, the work forms a constellation-like figure, prompting viewers to reflect on how the past continues to shape the living. As these floating signs combine with the movements of surrounding viewers, even the act of remembering becomes mutable.

The drifting seven constellations and the glacier-like fixed structure reconcile into a sensory dialogue—an embodiment of the artist’s wish that the departed’s footsteps become stars illuminating our own lives. For Park, creation must remain a question rather than a definition; relationships must be open possibilities rather than fixed conclusions. Having repeatedly transformed his practice through sharp critiques of social contradictions, Park’s present stands as both an expanded utopian trajectory and an autobiographical inquiry into disciplined creativity.

References

• 유동하는 기억, 훈육된 창의성에 관한 대안언어
  Flowing Memory: An Alternative Language on Disciplined Creativity