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Watering Dead Trees
Gye Hoon Park2008
Korean Art Museum Association
Seoul, South Korea
Is it possible to bud out by watering a dead tree continually? I planned to combine the element of time with artwork that is formed by nature, which is as art, during a repetitive cycle. I try to revitalize cut trees, peeled barks, and tied pieces of wood.
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Details
- Title: Watering Dead Trees
- Creator: Park, Gye Hoon
- Creator Lifespan: 1965
- Creator Nationality: Korean
- Creator Birth Place: Choongju, Korea
- Date Created: 2008
- Physical Dimensions: w700 x h2300 cm
- Type: Sculpture, Installation
- Medium: Zinc, oil bar
- 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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