Park Jong Hwa
“I want to be cheerful. As we get older and have more responsibilities, aren't we losing our smiles? “The world is not sweet, but I want to be a conveyer of the sweetness contained in the stories we live through my paintings.” Hyeonjeong Ahn (Art Critic, Doctor of Art Philosophy)
Artist Jonghwa Park, who practices Figurative Expressionism, emphasizes ‘conceptual brushstrokes’ that connect literary narrative and experience. The infinitely expanded variations of canvas, from digital images to readymades, go back and forth between traditional thinking and new actions, questioning the identity of contemporary art. The author presents ‘Empirical Humor,’ which melts his own experiences into stories recognized a priori through paradoxical re-exploration. The artist's narrative, reminiscent of Korea's Hernan Bas, shows the cleverness of setting the meaning of figurative painting as the starting point of thought, as if satirizing the age of consumption in which images are endlessly poured out. Going beyond the level of simple mimesis, the time collage method is adopted to match the artist's reality with different cultural contexts where reality and illusion, reality and desire are mixed. This attitude is a strategy to rearrange the act of drawing to fit the contemporary context, and it leads to an act of possibility to meet future visitors by connecting ‘narratives between time and space’. The most important thing is to question the essence! The artist sets the beginning of reproduction as ‘reinterpretation of the act of drawing.’ In response to the question, “Why do I draw?”, Park Jong-hwa says, “Because the puzzle-like task of finding and combining images is fun.” Combining colors is an act of compromise with the screen and an encounter with creative filtering for harmony within a scene.
The initial work was a process of unifying the base with a dark color through Photoshop. However, after establishing the concept of ‘Play Painting’, which involves playing on a canvas, the process of combining images became similar to the process of creating mise-en-scène through ‘scene capture’, as if playing a game. Actually, the author enjoys watching movies. As movie scenes that started out as a waste of time became the main motif of the work, conception became play and expression became creation through the senses of the hands. Famous artists are involved in the work, but their space never mixes with real space. The screens are sensuously collaged with multiple scenes yet segmented by time, creating a strange experience of setting up multiple worlds within a single screen, like watching Alice in Wonderland. The reason why the author ‘creates a strange order among the mixture’ by mixing heterogeneous characters is because of the question of the essence that our visual experiences are not all the same. The unique sense of shaking up humorous situations in an unfamiliar way is also in touch with the spirit of painters who emphasized surrealism, including Duchamp, Van Gogh, Dali, Warhol, and Magritte. The newly presented works encounter an ‘allegory of representation’ where questions create questions by throwing ‘visual truth (depth of time)’ on top of a satirical sense. Because of the overlap of time, intuitive storytelling that mixes homage to famous paintings, movies, and painters is summarized as a method of one-pointed perspective that expresses the essence in terms of content, but directs towards the artist whom the artist pays homage to in form. The method of composing the screen according to the level of time pursues the essence of representation that modern art tried to lay down, but because it implements expressionism through sensory collage, it results in ‘figurative expressionism’.
CV
Education
2007 Hongdae Painting Department Graduation Solo Exhibition
Solo exhibition
2022 Fill gallery “Sensory collage, dialogue between”
2013 Seoul contemporary art gallery “AGAIN”
2012 GS Street Gallery “CINEMA PARADISE” Art Fair
2022 “Incheon Asia Art Show 2022“ Phil Gallery
2021 Polestar Art Festival “side by side” Goyang Starfield
2019 “Affordable art fair 2019” Regina gallery, HONG KONG
2018 ASIA HOTEL ART FAIR “Regina gallery”
2012 KIAF “Duru art space”
Group exhibition
2023 August “Art Project,23_VOLER” KC Art Space (Pangyo)
2023 August “Constant moment” two-person exhibition HEDWIG Gallery
2023 May ”Episode3.ACT“ Gallery Rae (Busan)
2023 April “Geeks in Wonderland” K Museum of Contemporary Art
2023 February “WUNDERKAMMER” Hidden masterpiece. Mansion Nine Gallery
2021 “Disco Disco” Hangang Museum 2020 “Golden Triangle” Artertain
2020 Pure Love 5 “Attitude and Speech Method” Hoban Atrium
2019 “8 Sun Exhibition” Gwangmyeong “ART M”
2018 “Olmi’s Happy Travel Exhibition” Olmi Art Space
2017 “Bewitched by the Island” Exhibition Soo Gallery
2016 “ART AND THE CITY” Exhibition We Art Gallery
2013 Korean Pop Art Promising Artist Special Invitational Exhibition
2012 Gallery started “houses apartmaent community”
