A New Aesthetics of Relationship Sought through the Spatial-temporal Collage
Seo Jin-seok, Director of Busan Museum of Art

Park Inseong is an artist born in the 1980s and belongs to the MZ generation that is in between the analog and digital world, standing at the threshold of a dynamic society where everything in the universe transitions from material (atom) to immaterial (bit). In this turbulent era, where the traditional stability of the past and the innovative progress of the future coexist, new opportunities are arising. Park Inseong pursues his unique way in this era of the opportunities.
The first permanent photographic image in the world, View from the Window at Le Gras, created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, needed about 8 hours of exposure. Exposure times decreased significantly as photography evolved, reaching just 1/25th of a second in Eadweard Muybridge's The Horse in Motion. The easy capture of moving subjects was allowed due to the advancement of photography, which ultimately led to the development of cinema film at 24 frames per second. After all, photography is a process shaped by light and time, beginning with the representation of reality.
To achieve a superimposed effect that compresses the fourth dimension of “time” onto a two-dimensional surface, Park Inseong employs the technique of collaging film that is a relic of the analog era. Creating and expanding a space for his imagination between reality and virtual, he intertwines and fluctuates between transparency and opacity, ambiguity and clarity, stillness and motion. Functioning neither as a light source nor a reflector, but as a medium of transmission, film acts as an ambiguous entity that can encompass everything, thereby enhancing his artistic intent.
In his 1973 video piece Global Groove, artist Paik Nam-june tried to explore the technique of time collage. While the collage methods introduced by Picasso and Braque were about piecing together partial images to create a whole, Paik achieved the assembly of entire images to create a new, expanded whole. This signifies the emergence of an ideal aesthetic of solidarity and unity, where diverse subjects converge while retaining their individual identities, free from any hierarchical structure.
Park Inseong also fosters an aesthetic of unity by compressing the temporality of processes through the layering of distinct identities, evoking a sense of depth in time. This approach differs from the continuous layering found in monochrome painting and the discontinuous layering of time collage, situating his work in a new relational context. For instance, in his two-dimensional pieces, he subtly leaves and reveals traces of film as a medium, skillfully allowing for the coexistence of unavoidable reality and subjectivity, thereby enhancing the interaction between the two. His three-dimensional works similarly create a new spatial-temporal collage through the chemical fusion of accidentally crumpled objects and intentionally structured transparent tubes, reminiscent of a Möbius strip. The wooden pedestal that supports these works is not just a functional element; it boldly asserts its own visual identity, becoming another essential component in the spatial-temporal collage.
It has been a long time since Donghak philosoophy(東學思想), which advocated for the unity of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, and further sought the unity of East and West, was presented as an alternative to the dualism of modernism and the deconstructionism of postmodernism. Haewol Choi Si-young stated, “Mu-wei-i-hwa(無爲而化) is the true state of the universe, where humans, along with all things, harmonize with the natural laws of heaven.” All beings are subjects of the universe, where the divine resides within them, encompassing not only living organisms but also inanimate objects. This philosophy of reverence for things (敬物事狀) holds that even lifeless objects are respected as subjects of the universe, just like animals and plants. This concept aligns with quantum mechanics, which suggests that all things are interconnected by invisible strings, indicating that everything is both a part and a whole
In the early 20th century, after Heidegger's phenomenology, the shortcomings of Western philosophy were acknowledged, leading to the incorporation of Eastern thought. Many artists from the Fluxus movement in the 1960s also put it into practice, with Paik Nam-june emerging as perhaps the most successful contemporary artist in bridging Eastern and Western philosophies. Since then, numerous artists have continued to seek and explore new directions for art in the postmodern era.
Park Inseong has experienced both the analog and digital eras in a dual manner. By adapting to and absorbing the chaos of a changing society through his unique approach, he continues to experiment with the unification of Eastern and Western aesthetics using his original collage techniques of time and space. The aesthetic of unity that he explores involves creating a new relational aesthetic, where the identities of every image in the world come together harmoniously. Also, Park Inseong freely navigates various media, including painting, sculpture, installation, and video, merging existential self-reflection with socially engaged public art to establish a new, multifaceted artistic realm.
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