“Park Cheonwook”
Making Strange: The Parallel Lives
of Park Cheonwook’s Objects and Images
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An inventory of Park Cheonwook’s artistic cathexis
reveals an emphasis on mass-produced objects—sculpture, photography and
installations that combine fabricated objects with altered ready-mades to
explore visual perspective and dimensionality. “The objects say nothing by
themselves,” states the artist, who creates a parallel universe for his objects
through strategies of displacement. The roles these objects play are
articulated in three series, each building upon divergent conceptual parameters
that contemplate the reconciliation of object and space.
In the series <Wrapping>, everyday objects
are arranged and wrapped in continuous layers of cellophane until their
physical characteristics are obfuscated and their functionality rendered
inoperative, resulting in cocoon-like forms. In <The Sunkist Cannot Stand Alone> (2006), for example, a chair is wrapped until it can no
longer stand, invalidating its raison d'être. (The title refers to a
brand of furniture.) <I will go home early> (2006) evokes both great civilizations and
pre-civilization in one: A bicycle is transformed into a headless, limbless
combination of human and animal. Painted to resemble bronze, animal has
transitioned into industrial technology without learning how to walk first. In <Tapench> (2006), Park wraps together a pagoda monument
and bench. (The title is a portmanteau of the Korean word for pagoda, “tap,”
and “bench.”) And in <House Cleaning> (2006), Park depicts a life-size, cartoon-like
robotic figure standing atop a pedestal. Evoking modernist sculpture in its
presentation, it is accompanied by x-rays that reveal the mass-produced stuff
that give the figure form, such as a dust broom and rake. Exploring the central
idea of perspective (derived from the Latin perspicere,
meaning “to see through”), these metamorphoses ultimately subvert the
distinction between object and meaning.
Park’s practice is
related to the techniques of defamiliarization or ostranenie (making strange). Coined by critic Viktor Shklovsky in
his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” defamiliarization refers to the practice of
presenting the familiar in strange ways. By extension, Jacques Derrida’s
concept of différance plays on the
double meaning of the French word différer,
“to defer” and “to differ.” While Park indeed makes strange and defers meaning,
the work in the series <Silent Smile> recalls early Renaissance anamorphic perspective, in
which a distorted image becomes recognizable when viewed from a unique vantage
point, typically by way of its reflection, a cylindrical mirror or a particular
viewing angle.
In <Silent Smile>, Park photographs
sculptural tableaux placed in various sites from different vantage points. <Thinking about Village> (2007) is the most succinct example, and also
the most deceiving upon first glance. The image consists of a street scene in single-point
perspective. At the center of the composition is what appears to be a
photograph on a tripod stand, depicting an aerial view of a model of the solar
system above a table that stands on a floor map of the world. In fact, the seeming
photograph on the stand is not a photograph at all, but a three-dimensional
sculptural tableau. The rectangular photographic frame provides the conceptual
parameters that limit what is made visible in the final object. That which
literally “fits” into the pre-determined borders of the frame determines what
is cut from the sculpture (i.e., “cropped” from view) using dimensions
reduction. He then creates a stand for the object and positions it into various
situations, documenting it from various vantage points. The object now exists
as a 3D substitute for flatness.
The source object of <Sahara Goldfish> (2008) is a replica of a person in a
hooded-sweatshirt; face down and asleep at a desk. The object is photographed
on steps, in a sidewalk planter and on the street atop a barrel. In the street
scene, a circular street mirror to the right of the barrel captures the
sculpture’s backside, exposing the sharp cut edges of the desk as well as the
white plaster the figure is made from. In the final presentation, all three
photographs are exhibited, as well as the source object. The inclusion of
streaming video of the object implicates the passage of time as an active
component of an object’s life.
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Untitled _ 2011 pigment print 100x65cm
Invoking painterly
compositions within their rectilinear window frameworks, the perspectival
illusionism of <Secret Smile> suggests the techniques of trompe l’oeil painting, as
well as set design, in which objects become props. Whereas trompe l’oeil
involves realistic imagery to create optical illusions that the objects
depicted exist in 3D, Park employs 3D objects–altered, fabricated or
arranged–to depict the optical illusion that the objects exist in 2D. Park’s
process of anamorphosis is shared by way of a trick concealed “inside” the
image or via documentation that reveal how this flatness is achieved.
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Grow in the middle _ 2012plastic,aluminum,steel 200x200x140cm
Vacillating between
transmogrification, anamorphosis and assemblage, Park never leaves the object
alone, hence denying the possibility of an essence. Distinguishing one thing
from another based on the level of distortion achieved, he underscores the
extent to which imaging informs dimensionality and perspective, as well as
figurative and literal ways of seeing. Rife on visual puns, light on irony and
socio-economic associations, the meaning of Park’s objects plays second fiddle
to his process. Yet, no matter how strange, the deliberate confusion of his
objects cannot completely deny the disharmony between object and use-value. His
objects may have been endowed with parallel lives; however, in pointing to both
their creation and destruction, Park cannot help but draw attention back to the
very world from whence they came.
This
article is commissioned by the Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon as part of
international Critique Program 2012
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