Park Ki-woong
Park Ki-woong (born December 30, 1958 in Seoul , South Korea ) is a South Korean visual artist.
Life
Park Ki-woong studied painting and art theory at Hongik University in Seoul with a focus on contemporary European painting. He received his PhD in 1997 and has been an art professor at Hongik University since 2001.
For his work as a visual artist, the material steel is in the foreground. Following up on the ideas of Frank Stella and Anselm Kiefer , he strives to combine image and sculpture into a single unit. He understands steel or its basic material, iron, as a basis of modern civilization. It stands for durability and non-deformability and appears everywhere in everyday life. But this outwardly visible impression of steel as an almost indestructible material is deceptive, because despite its hardness it is deformable. Otherwise it could not serve as a central structural element of the modern affluent society. Park goes even further: steel is not only malleable, it can also be "deconstructed". This means the destructibility by human hands, as it were as the zenith of a humane hubris.
In this context, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 conveyed a central insight to Park : Steel can even be melted through human destructiveness. The enormous amount of exploding kerosene that poured from the aircraft over the twin towers literally melted the steel structure of the building. As a barbaric act of destruction, a “deconstruction” of the worst kind. The melting of the hardened steel forms, so to speak, a metaphor for the vulnerability of our modern civilization due to an ideological readiness to use violence.
This allegory is clearly expressed in Park's more recent work cycles. In various thematic areas he experiments with the material steel, shapes and deforms it, makes it flow and processes it with color pigments. He uses steel to create the unity of image and sculpture that he originally strived for in his projects and that can be described as steel painting.
There is never a lack of socially critical aspect in his work. The problems that he addresses in his works are also well known to us in Germany. Again and again he takes up the division of his country and the nuclear threat posed by North Korea in recent years. Here, too, he sees the seed for deconstruction laid out and his works are an appeal to human reason not to give such seeds any development opportunities.
Park Ki-woong represents a critical art which, especially in the age of globalization, shows those problems of our modern society that are by no means of particular, but rather of global importance. His works are regularly shown not only in Asia, but also in Europe and the United States.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Park, Ki-woong |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | South Korean artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 30, 1958 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Seoul , South Korea |