About The Work

‘Muscle Memory Drawings’(2017~) is a series in which Park Jung Hyuk approaches memory not as an “image” but as an accumulation of bodily reactions and actions. The muscle memory referred to here is not a memory that recalls a specific scene, but rather something closer to “Muscle Memory” that becomes inscribed in the body through repeated movements.
 
Fragmented images in which photography and painting are interwoven, along with frames that closely crop parts of a face, resemble the way memory operates. Memory is not reproduced in a clear form; it is erased, overlapped, and continuously transformed. In this process, past time is suspended and then recalled again, seeping into the perceptions of the present and the future.
 
The artist repeatedly performs this structure of memory through the immediate medium of drawing. ‘Drawing for Muscle Memory’ is a practice aimed at inscribing the act of drawing itself into the body, and mythological and religious images, along with shifting motifs, reveal the uncertainty and fluidity of memory.
 
‘Muscle Memory Drawings’ is not a preparatory stage for painting. ‘Muscle Memory Drawings’ poses and performs questions not about “What is Drawn,” but about how one remembers and how the body responds, and it is a core series that forms a fundamental layer of Park Jung Hyuk’s artistic world, going beyond a mere preparatory phase for painting.

Provenance

Artist Collection, 2025