Sobin Park “The Mandate of Heaven”
The Gabarron Foundation Carriage House Center for the Arts
This event has ended.
Sobin Park’s work may have started with suggestive courtly love imagery that some critics of her recent show at the Gwangju City Museum read as the Korean Puseoksa legend of the love story of Uisang and the maiden Seonmyo. But, her most recent work places greater emphasis on the heavens, the dragon, and historic tradition dotted with contemporary cities. The city is full traditional temples but also of skyscrapers that plunge into the depths, rise, twist, and turn according to the dragon’s movement as if on a mountain top or on a dragon’s hump. So that, one might say that Park is accessing her own Korean Shamanistic beliefs that placed the dragon as the all-powerful divine royal creature associated with controlling catastrophic natural events. But, Park may also be referencing the recent natural catastrophes that have up-ended whole cities around the world tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes. In many of these recent works the maiden has been conflated or become one with the dragon.
Park’s work references the worldly or material as a small part of the divine or heavenly. Her monumental works that depict dragon, heavenly clouds, that are dotted with parts of cities, cease to be about courtly love, if indeed they ever were, and becomes about the struggle for power, fight to stay alive within the churning dynamism of the dragon’s tail that threatens to submerge.
The dragon’s scales have at this time conflated with the clouds and woman’s hair resulting in huge areas of whorls, swirls, curls that in their circular shape migrate, shift and flow displacing solidity to become spirit or void. Park’s dragon, woman and serpent have merged into one abstract circular shape. We saw this type of development in Kandinsky’s work as well, when he abstracted the St. George (rider, horse, lance) leitmotif more and more until it culminated into a circle as seen in his work entitled Several Circles, 1926. This recent abstracting evolution in Park can be seen as an effort to break out of naturalistic representation to become more symbolic and inwardly moving.
Media
Schedule
from September 22, 2013 to October 23, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-09-25 from 18:00 to 20:00