At first sight, Park Jieun’s paintings are dynamic exercises in gestural, graphic brush work. Her technique references traditional Korean and Chinese practice, but as the viewing distance narrows and reduces the viewer becomes aware of images contained within the boundaries of the dark, sweeping marks. Urban landscapes are meticulously delineated and gradually reveal themselves to be pictures of the great cities of the world, familiar and iconographic, subtly layered into the decorated surface.
The artist is an inveterate and enthusiastic traveller who discloses personal narrative content within the formal, painterly structure of her compositions. The works assimilate discrete, pictorial information within formal abstraction. This establishes a tension – things are not as anticipated. As in life, expectation and experience can be contradictory – Paris and New York are not necessarily true to their popular images but nevertheless remain attached to their initial framing. The paintings express this perception.
In setting up such a pictorial strategy the painter performs a balancing act that is supported by a supple mastery of technique. She controls the point where the different layers of information reveal themselves. This is no small task as it requires a skilful calibration of tone, colour and emphasis to facilitate a seamless transition from abstraction to representation. With these elegant and aesthetically seductive pictures Park Jieun presents us with a set of assumptions to unpack. They are a subtle challenge to how we may negotiate a view of the world. They propose a process of elision, where differing versions of reality slide in and out of view. By layering traditional ink techniques with images of iconic global cities, Park creates a visual dialogue across geography and time. These paintings are as much about her own journeys – physical, cultural, and artistic – as they are about the destinations themselves. They ask us to look twice, and to see that the world’s greatest places might be waiting quietly inside the sweep of a single brush.