Wonjoo PARK

Wonjoo Park’s works make us aware of the difference between reality and concept, using irony and contradiction to create differing and distorted meanings, as well as meanings that recombine to produce new meanings. One way in which Park’s works create irony is by changing the meaning of an object by altering its materiality or true nature. For example, in her Smoothing (2007) series, an ordinary wooden frame with a glass panel insert is folded, crumpled, and smoothed out again like paper. The materiality of wood and glass remains intact, but their form is altered to resemble the malleability of paper — what then are we to call this strange object? These works make us reconsider our commonsense, prejudiced, or biased understanding of the nature of objects.
Another way to produce irony is through parody, which allows us to derive different meanings from the space between the original and the appropriation. For example, Park’s Fresher Widow (2009) is a parody of Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow (1920), and in her Blade Trilogy (2009), she parodies Lucio Fontana’s act of stabbing the canvas with a knife. Duchamp’s wordplay (replacing “window” with “widow”) is echoed by Park’s own substitution of “fresh” with “fresher”. This response to Duchamp reveals the macho system of repression inherent in Modernist or avant-garde narratives. By appropriating the act of stabbing, she transplants Fontana’s logic of form into the logic of body. In other words, she interprets the slashed canvas as a physical wound.
Park’s works produce irony by disrupting our assumptions of the correspondence between materiality and meaning. This is best captured in Chair for Monophobia (2004), where she crafts an elaborate chair using A4 paper, a commonly used office supply. Surprisingly, though, the chair is a replica of the electric chair, an authorized tool of legally sanctioned murder. The chair is a symbol of extreme violence, and reflects the social and existential desire for violence, since capital punishment is murder carried out by public agreement. In our “civilized” age, the electric chair has become a relic of the past, but that does not guarantee the elimination of other systemic devices used by the state to commit murder and violence. Could it be that in the absence of overt physical aggression, a subtler form of authority is seeping into our lives and even into our subconscious? The true nature of such formless and invisible — yet insidious — forces is represented by the paper chair, as well as the word “monophobia” (the fear of being alone). It is a phobia that is as abstract as a sheet of blank paper, yet its existential weight is as heavy as the electric chair.
Park uses heterogeneous, unfamiliar, or deformed objects to exemplify the instability of thought and of life lived on the margins. She questions our unwavering faith in immutable truth with evidence of the reversible and the mutable, and from a breakdown in mechanical thinking elicits a fragile but subtle reflection.

<100.art.kr: Korean Contemporary Art Scene>. Open Books, 2012, p.478
Chung-Hwan Kho.

Wonjoo PARK
Born in 1961, Masan, Korea

EDUCATION
1987 M.F.A. Sculpture, Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul, Korea
1984 B.F.A. Sculpture, Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2015 Visible, Invisible (two-person show), Nook Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2009 The Artist of Today-Equinox, Kim Chong Yung Museum, Seoul, Korea
2008 Smoothing, Sølyst Artist in Residence Center, Jyderup, Denmark
2007 Smoothing, Artside Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2004 Vegetarian Sculpture, Project Space Sarubia, Seoul, Korea
2003 She Was, Bookfinders, Belfast, Northern Ireland
2002 The Blind’s Elephant and Truth (two-person show), Insa Art Space, Seoul, Korea
1999 Oscillating, Lewisham Arthouse, London, United Kingdom
1998 Oscillating, Gallery Sangmoondang, Seoul, Korea
1995 Self-Portrait, Gallery Siuter, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2016 Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2016, Yongji Park Lake, Changwon, Korea
2013 Pilchuck Glass School Annual Auction Gala, The Westin Seattle, Seattle, USA
2013 Artistic Period, Interalia, Seoul, Korea
2010 allTURNatives: Form+Spirit, Woodturning Center, Philadelphia, USA
2009 Variety, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea
2009 Against the Sculptural, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
2009 Another Masterpiece-New Acquisitions, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeonggi-do, Korea
2008 Sculpture Now, Moran Museum, Gyeonggi-do, Korea
2007 New Acquisition 2006, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
2006 Denial is a River, Sculpture Center, New York, USA