From the 2023 work Park’s Land 27—where the veil encircling the Virgin Mary's head meets the protruding snout of a wolf placed squarely at the center—I begin to trace the artist’s aesthetic clues. The recent series titles, announced as periodical themes, are gathered under “Park’s Land.” Rendering it as “the artist’s aesthetic world” or “his aesthetic domain” would hardly be an overstatement. In its twenty-seventh iteration, the work presents portions of the Virgin’s veiled head and torso, fragments of a wolf’s snout, flames occupying the exposed face and background, something resembling teeth and a tongue drifting far from the wolf itself, and three incomplete circles floating on the surface. A field dominated by greys and the orange of fire. The aggregate of sensory images—whose contextual coordinates refuse immediate alignment—appears to me as a recent signal from Park Jung Hyuk’s aesthetic world.

His paintings are built on encounters between stone and living bodies (often the human figure), between grey and flesh tones, between sacred icons and the profane, as well as on nonlinear sequences of fragments that resist straightforward connection. Such is the overarching tenor of the ‘Park’s Land’ series. Added to this, one cannot overlook the persistent coupling of eroticism and the grotesque. As in Park's Land 18, which previously appropriated the veil from Michelangelo’s marble Pietà, Park’s bodies appear cracked like stone or fused with actual stone. Consider Park’s Land 26 (2023), which multilayeredly reconfigures a portion of Giambologna’s marble Hercules Slaying Nessus and grafts upon it a flesh-toned figure; or Park’s Land 2, completed a year earlier, addressing the same subject against a background of sea and fire. Across these works and others in the series, the signature of Park’s visual language often emerges through the insertion of waves and flames.

These seemingly unmotivated appearances of water and fire deepen the singularity of his imagery. There is no narrative reason for flames to rise around the Virgin’s face, nor is Hercules’ slaying of Nessus a seaside event. Much like his selective borrowing of fragments to devise a personal mode of re-presentation, the fixed narratives of myth are granted little authority. The very title “Park’s Land” suggests that neither the Virgin Mary nor the Hercules myth serves as the work’s thematic or interpretive center. When he was invited to the 《3 Years》 exhibition last December at ARTING’s 3rd-anniversary program, I briefly distilled what I had long sensed in his work.
 
Summarized, that earlier exhibition text argued the following: the texture running through his oeuvre is a fusion of eroticism and the grotesque, echoing the sensibility identified with “Eroguronansensu (エログロナンセンス)”, a term coined in Japan’s Shōwa era to describe artworks and mass culture where sensuality, the grotesque, and absurd humor intertwined. In those years, smoky cafés entertained guests with alluring hostesses, and establishments promoting “free love” gained popularity. During the height of this culture (1929–1936), the Empire of Japan even banned related publications under criminal law. Yet the triad of eroticism, grotesquerie, and humor has outlived its era, resurfacing across contemporary Japanese art. Where expression is now far less restricted, one might say that this sensibility has become one of the cultural engines sustaining Japan’s long artistic momentum. Given the period of its emergence, “Eroguronansensu” likely functioned as a gesture—perhaps even a provocation—against the displacement of premodern values by the “modern” culture imported from the West. Whenever existing hierarchies tremble and reassemble, latecomers tend to deploy such bold maneuvers that earlier generations find difficult to tolerate.

It has been some time since nonlinearity emerged as a key framework for understanding contemporary art; but as hypertext culture became the grammar of daily life—clicking links, leaping across nodes—nonlinearity turned into an unavoidable mode of representing contemporary existence itself. Grey fragments of Renaissance sculpture, shards of fire, shards of water, patches of flesh, pockets of darkened clouds—each with its own distinct presence—converge on the same pictorial plane. Approached through a linear mode of viewing, the difficulty of locating a coherent context in Park Jung Hyuk’s figurative paintings stems precisely from this. The hybrid presence formed by the stony greys of Renaissance marble and the sensuous flesh tones of modern bodies—this, too, constitutes a nonlinear condition through which one might read ‘Park’s Land.’ Nonlinear composites, with their simultaneous and overlapping claims, offer no easy interpretive access. Yet they often strike the senses with immediacy. When eroticism, the grotesque, and visual humor entwine, reason falters, speech interrupts; the very structure of instinct, woven into nonlinear assemblage, has become one of the defining

References

• 《에로·그로·넌센스가 비선형으로 결합할 때 (When Ero·Gro·Nonsense Combines Nonlinearly)》