PARK Wunggyu: Intestine for Ritual
ARARIO GALLERY Seoul will be hosting PARK Wunggyu’s solo exhibition Intestine for Ritual from May 24 to July 1, 2023. The artist has consistently presented works that explore the painterly possibilities of Oriental art by creating a symbolic order of positive and negative through subjects that evoke ambivalent emotions. This exhibition, the artist's first solo showcase at Arario Gallery Seoul, features 14 works, including the central "Dummy" series and new and old works along its extension, all of which can be seen on the gallery's fourth-floor.
PARK Wunggyu(b.1987), who specialized in Oriental painting, captures images on canvas that evoke ambivalent characteristics, based on his artistic responses to classical Buddhist paintings from Korea and Japan. Particularly, he refers to the 'Hwayukbeop' (畵六法, Six Principles of Painting) of Oriental painting, constituted by imitation, composition, form, texture, transformation, and application. Drawing on these principles, he incorporates into his artwork ambiguous emotions and sensations provoked by 'negativity', such as negative things, situations, and emotions. The exhibition Intestine for Ritual takes 'Soondae'(Blood Sausage), a food known for its taste but primarily made from animal intestines, as its subject, adding layers of the artist's personal memories, emotions, and aesthetic attitudes. Specifically, the animal intestines, densely depicted using elements such as dots, lines, and shapes at the center of the canvas with margins left blank, borrow the format of works like sacred paintings with religious themes, thus refreshing emotional connections. The Soondae, extending from a diverse set of formal perspectives, radiates a spectrum of positives and negatives, evoking ambiguous emotions and sensations felt at the extremes of clean and dirty, beautiful and ugly, positive and negative.
If the "Dummy" series, initiated in 2015, depicted the forms of monsters and gods without a specific subject, from 2019 it began to incorporate more concrete subjects and realistic forms, such as various insects and creature-like entities, including moths and cicadas. In this exhibition, the works on display include Dummy No. 91~100 (2023), a series of ten pieces that magnify and depict the unique formal characteristics seen in each part of an ox's internal organs. Alongside this, the exhibition also features The Ten Oxherding Pictures (2023), a work that encapsulates the process of eating, digesting, and excreting an ox's in ten frames, mirroring the ten stages of the Zen painting 'Sibu do' (十牛圖, Ten Ox-Herding Pictures), which symbolizes the journey to discover human nature. Also included is Scar No.17 (2023), a work that spells out in Chinese characters the ten types of an ox's internal organs. All these works come together in one space for the viewer's exploration.
PARK Wunggyu began his active career as a resident artist at the Chungju Art Studio from 2016. He held solo exhibitions at Art Space Boan1(Seoul, Korea) in 2022, Onground2(Seoul, Korea) in 2018, Space Kneet(Seoul, Korea) in 2017, and Chungju Art Studio(Cheongju, Korea) in 2016. He also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Ilmin Museum of Art(Seoul, Korea) in 2022, Seoul Museum of Art Project Gallery(Seoul, Korea), Danwon Art Museum(Ansan, Korea) and Art Sonje Center (Seoul, Korea) in 2021, and Goyang Aramnuri Aram Art Gallery(Goyang, Korea) in 2019.
