artpark

Park Neung Saeng Text

Artist statement

City(都市) - Past, present, and future coexist. Demolished hillside town, reconstructed apartment complexes, blue and yellow water tanks on top of the building, modernized office buildings, and houses made of ancient bricks all coexist in my mind expressionlessly. Surrounding the Han River, especially the landscape of Seoul is consisted of numerous bridges and various modernized, dynamic skyscrapers along with an enormous urban forest. As I climb, walk, run, observe, and breathe, I try my best to sketch the actuality(實境) of the city in my mind. My mind(精神) depicts the present and the past’s scenery and demonstrates the actual objects and surrounding circumstances through the eyes and the body.

Nature(自然) - As I climb up the mountain, I notice the significant difference between the mountain’s ridge and the skyscrapers’ height. When I examine the building’s human constructed high altitude, I realize how meaningless to have such high desires in life. Throughout the history, mountain has contributed a lot to humans. As a spiritual idol and a basis in our daily life, mountain has delivered us a universal experience. Mountain is a sacred space with a generic origin, a pure space filled with diverse sounds of creatures, and a natural space all around. For me, depicting mountain is unveiling the nature’s origin through personal experiences and discovering my mind(精神).
Rather than a picture in perspective, I prefer a picture in synesthesia. It is neither illusion nor perspective representation. It is portraying what I feel through my own body and eyes. It is not just an object’s simple reproduction. Rather it is a manifestation of a sensual landscape which puts together one’s eyes and mind that pursue all the actual landscape in every detail. It is a sort of pictorial book and a recreation of the visible reality in a panorama form.

Reference
Actuality(實境)(An object of thoughts and mind)
Mind(精神)(A sense of purpose for a matter and body)

Travels through seasons

The works are a result of the experiencing the context of the environment, starting from nature, and experiencing the boundaries of the city. From a number of years ago I've discovered this boundary condition in many other cities, travelling to New York, Paris, Berlin, Spain and China. Through the experience of new and foreign spaces I worked to understand the city through sketches, brush paintings and physically walking or climbing the terrain.
My painting has a composition that emphasizes various points of view. It is the size of the paper where there are self-contained various points of movement, and no single overall perspective view, little segments of daily life and movement contained within a landscape of serenity. Each work captures a varies of small segments of human condition, in a sense allowing the viewer to experience this miniature world freely, and with ease in comparison to the energy and physical movement of seeing all these scenes. These visual scenes of contemplation are focused in the mind of the viewer; stimulating the mental ability to perceive the real world and almost allowing the view to experience flight and flying, the weightlessness and physical burden taken off their shoulders.
In viewing my works, I imagine the scale and detail allows the viewer to experience the freedom from the built environment, and actively engage the viewer just by looking.