From the 13th of January to the 17th of February 2023, the Galerie Anna25 hosted the exhibition Kejoo Park - Innere des Äußeren ( The inside of the Outside) dedicated to the South Korean female artist Kejoo Park.
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Kejoo Park was born and raised in South Korea; later, she moved to New York to study painting and from there to Harvard, where she devoted herself to landscape architecture. These stations outline the artist’s work, characterized by the contrasts between man and nature, interior and exterior, painting and object art.
One of the main concepts on which Kejoo Park’s production is based is the idea that freedom is not a given for people and nature.
Nature is indeed fragile, vulnerable and precious and it needs constant protection and care to survive. But here an ambiguity emerges: protecting also means moving away from the natural environment. So it takes artificiality to maintain naturalness and there is inevitably a coexistence of the two.
In her work, Kejoo Park focuses on the tension between naturalness and artificiality, between the source of life and artificial conditions. For her, the hard shell and the soft core it protects are not opposites but they exist in parallel.
This deep relationship becomes clear in the exhibition “The Inside of the Outside”. The rough, well-fortified exterior is in contrast with the fragile interior, but at the same time, it is nevertheless indispensable for its survival. Park tries to make this duality visible and to raise awareness of this coexistence.
Man-made rough and hard materials, such as concrete and steel, are juxtaposed with vibrant colours and valuable or fragile materials such as gold or paper, building, in this way, relationships between the elements to be protected and the protective shell.
However, this could not happen without a look towards the future since nature and freedom are elementary pillars that we have to cherish like precious treasures. Along the exhibition path, Kajoo Park conveys and symbolically manifests this hope.
Check out all of Kejoo Park’s artworks and her exhibition on Kooness!
Cover image: Kejoo Park, Goldwind, 2017, courtesy of Galerie Anna25
Written by Galerie Anna25
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