Inconvenient Statement
Gye Hoon Park2007
Korean Art Museum Association
Seoul, South Korea
Vulnerable Consciousness and endangered faith are metaphors of the artist's uncomfortable feelings about his identity and his conversations about reality. He deplores false revolutionaries who have narrow, one-sided worldviews. They simply condone injustice. What he feels most uncomfortable about this is the reality of the pseudo artists, or imitators. Park believes that serious philosophical struggle should be exposed in art and the artist's role must be held more important than anything else. Exploring unsaid and unheard issues through exposing truths is the work of an artist through art making.
- Title: Inconvenient Statement
- Creator: Park, Gye Hoon
- Creator Lifespan: 1965
- Creator Nationality: Korean
- Creator Birth Place: Choongju, Korea
- Date Created: 2007
- Physical Dimensions: w4500 x h2200 x d4500 cm
- Type: Sculpture, Installation
- Medium: Wooden flowerpot, drawing, wooden stick, iron welding
- 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.
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