WILD AND PURE

 

Despite his noteworthy finesse, the Korean artist Park Doo has refrained from using academic language as a means to help viewers understand how they might look at his paintings. Instead, he prefers a more ambiguous poetic language that raises questions more than readymade answers.

Given the artist's originality both as a painter and a theorist. Park decided early in his career that he would show his paintings primarily outside his homeland. In doing so, he foresaw distinct advantages. To exhibit in Berlin, Tokyo, Paris, and New York would most likely attract greater attention among his colleagues than showing his work repeatedly in Seoul and Busan, particularly before his reputation as a painter had become established.

This is not to say that Park separated himself from East Asia in his intellectual background. In fact, it was quite the opposite. One of his most influential mentors, Dong Qichang, a Ming Dynasty painter and theorist, was known to characterize the act of painting as an experience similar to taking a journey in which the journey itself becomes more significant than reaching a destination. In other words, the focus on temporality is more significant than the stasis. Painting becomes an ongoing discovery - worthy of feeling - as the artist continues to push forward.

Given a virtual overview of selected paintings by Park Doo, it would appear that the consistency of his work plays a fundamental role through the mixing and application of color. In the context of Park's formal invention, he employs twisted shapes of color as the source of his painterly content. Park's groupings of inflated, semi-transparent applications of paint continue to sustain a remarkable quality.

 

From a historical position, abstract painting was internationally present during the mid-twentieth century on different levels, beginning in the late 1940s through the early 1970s in various parts of Europe, East Asia, South America, and New York City. To some extent, there was a revival in the 1980s called Neo-Expressionism - a movement that combined abstraction with figuration and therefore was not entirely pure. The painting moments from the earlier post-War period emerged from various histories including radically different cultures.

Following these aesthetic movements, Park Doo's contribution to painting comes later in the twenty-first century from a series of different sources that together constitute what might be called Asian aesthetics. In addition, one might consider the importance of emotional content in Park's painterly applications, which goes beyond our access to rational space and time, and therefore, is difficult to qualify.

However, what does appear accessible in the paintings of Park is a combination of technical skill and experimentation: two qualities that make up what might be called a spatial disorder. This is, perhaps, most notably present in his series, Wild and Pure, In which the imperfection of the brush constitutes "a perfect spontaneity"-a term the artist acquired from his mentor Dong Qichang.

This suggests that in painting "personal expression exceeds form al skills." thereby emphasizing the

"self-cultivation of the artist's character."