Sukwon Park
Korea, Republic of
11 Works exhibited on Kooness
Represented by
Works by Sukwon Park
Sukwon Park(b. 1942), a visionary of modern Korean abstract artist, is known for his work that gives a strong impression and fresh shock by breaking away from conventional sculpture and painting. In particular, Schorched Earth, the winner of the 1968 National Exhibition, is considered to be Sukwon Park's early masterpiece, which was a sensational sculpture at that time. His understanding and expressing various materials and nature has a lot of influence on Korean art world.
After exploring abstract expression in the early 1960s and minimalism in the 1970s, the artist synthesized the previous works in the 1980s and established an independent world of works. The change in the subject from ‘Scorched Earth’ to ‘Mutation-Relation’ through ‘Accumulation’ implies elements of 'segmentation' and 'conjugation'. Mutation-Relation means stacking, which means cutting or dismantling various materials and then stacking them again. The artist's work of structurally re-accumulating cut objects can be seen as the influence of minimalism, but it also contains a naturalistic interpretation that exposes the texture as it is, unlike artificial and upright minimalism. His work is differentiated from the minimalism of other artificial concepts in that he considers the deformation of matter that occurs in the making process, or even the traces of material left behind, to be the essence of the work.
‘Scorched Earth’ means ‘a state of being devastated and ruined by fire,’ which means ‘blacken soil.’ It is a representative work of modern sculpture that was born with the theme of chaos and tragedy in Korean society after the war. The blighted spaces like the scorched earth, and the traces of tension in which the intense energy of the moment escaped sharply from the original space, express the anger and shock of the time that the artist experienced.natural state. The artist's work not