Melancholy

Gye Hoon Park 2000

Korean Art Museum Association
Seoul, South Korea

Park has consistently used bean sprouts as primary subject matter. His work's appearance and internal values undergo modification and expansion. He worked on the Melancholy series with about 1,000 bean sprouts. He spent many years, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, stitching them to hemp cloth . He made these while engrossed in thoughts of creation and the idea of how to grow life. He identifies his artistic creation with hard labor until his works meet total completeness. Park is troubled by the phenomenon of the uniquely original. His work evokes the thought of being mass-produced, cloned, and deprived from its originality.

Details

Title: Melancholy
Creator: Park, Gye Hoon
Creator Lifespan: 1965
Creator Nationality: Korean
Creator Birth Place: Choongju, Korea
Date Created: 2000
Physical Dimensions: w1800 x h270 cm
Type: Sculpture , Installation
Medium: Hemp cloth , needle, sewing
Critic's Note: Adopting Unstable Conscience as Indicator, adopting Wavering Faith as a Lamp The general public is more fanatical about provocative pleasure and fictional images than that of righteous, truth-seeking work. They overlook the artist's struggle and profound inner self-existence. Addicted to the world of vacant fantasy, they prefer sugary fiction to a boring truth. They want to escape from reality, rather than reforming it from a fore-thinker's perspective. Are their lives true or free? Are their lives not enraptured by hallucination, self-reflection and contemplation? Are they not avoiding social conscience responsibility, compromising reality and forgetting their true self? I keep thinking about my unstable conscience and feeble faith as an artist, which gradually grew in time. Park Gye-Hoon's statement reflects the meaning and philosophy he portrays in his work. The familiar commercial tagline, "The place you live explains you," is carved on a tree made of wooden jars. It is supported by metal bars, which appear soaring in the air. This tagline, which was once successful in luring apartment hunters, sways over the jars suspended from each bar. So the viewer can ask, “Is our identity represented by such materials?" Contemporary society lives in a way where possessions overtake their existence, lacking self-purification. Park's "unstable conscience" or "material conscience" poignantly denounces any compromise between the profane and how he identifies as an artist. He deplores the reality of false revolutionaries and artists committing copycat crimes. They remiss in expanding their views and are overlooking the wrong because they are blinded by profane success. His recent theme concerns the essential role of the artist, and the way artists’ function in the world. He asserts that the roles of an artist are to present conundrums and raise inconvenient issues that are hard to solve in a corrupt world where principles and consciences are disregarded.
Artist's Education: Choongbuk National University. M.F.A., Sculpture.

Additional Items

Melancholy (Supplemental)

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