This work begins with the image of an intoxicated salaryman. The salaryman represents the most typical figure of the ‘working human’, one who is constantly demanded to acquire ever more capabilities within contemporary society. Such human desire expands the body like the multiple arms and legs of a cephalopod, visually exposing the compulsion and lack that require a single body to extend simultaneously in multiple directions.
 
Yet the state of intoxication loosens control and social norms, and within that gap, human beings gain the possibility of revealing suppressed desires or transforming into unfamiliar forms. The splitting and overlapping bodies within the pictorial field demonstrate the process through which the desire for capability alters the human body itself.
 
The fissures opening in the sea, the recurring circular forms, and the flickering flames symbolize that transformation does not proceed in a single direction, but rather occurs as a complex moment in which environment, body, and desire shift simultaneously. Fire here is not an agent of destruction, but a heat that initiates transformation, while the sea becomes a site where the boundary between body and environment is blurred.
 
Through this work, I seek to visualize the desire for capability inherent in the working human, and the ways in which such desire transforms the body and identity. Ultimately, the ‘intoxicated salaryman’ in this work is not an individual drunk figure, but a symbolic presence that reveals the body and the state of desire of contemporary individuals who are continually required to undergo change and transformation.


Park Jung Hyuk’s third painting series, ‘Park’s Land’, unfolds around the idea of “transformation.” When beginning this body of work, the artist was interested in exploring a sense of possibility, and transformation became the theme through which that notion could be articulated. Here, transformation does not refer to a simple shift from A to B, as in familiar mythic or cinematic narratives.

Instead, it encompasses a broader spectrum of states—what something could become, how roles shift according to circumstance, and the latent conditions inherent within a subject.

Figures and forms in the paintings appear structurally dismantled, blurred, or distorted through layered brushwork. These visual disruptions are less about depicting physical change and more about revealing multiple potential states at once. 

Ultimately, ‘Park’s Land’ considers the conditions that allow transformation to occur rather than the moment of change itself. Through overlapping imagery and fluid gestures, the series presents a world defined not by what is changing, but by what can change—an expanded terrain for the artist’s ongoing exploration of painterly imagination.