To Create An Image
On the Works of Park Inseong
Carina Plath (Curator for painting and sculpture, Sprengel Museum Hannover)
We need less perfect but more free films.
—Jonas Mekas
When there is talk of the connection between film and color, one thinks immediately of the painted, abstract films of Stan Brakhage or the intensive, colorful composition of the films of Paul Sharits from the 1960s and 1970s. The two belonged to the group of American filmmakers associated with the so-called structural film, which focused on a fundamental investigation of the material and on the specific characteristics of film. Whereas Brakhage became a master of the hand-colored film, Sharit’s films and film installations are characterized by the intensive coloration of the individual filmic units, namely the frames, which were combined into abstract sequences. Sharits also created out of strips of celluloid pictorial objects in which he wrapped and glued filmstrips onto stretcher frames and canvasses—whereby filmic material became pictorial material.
Today these experiments have for the most part been relegated to film history and have scarcely been experienced as an artistic tradition, inasmuch as they are only shown in niches of film museums and cinematheques; moreover, most of them were never digitalized. Hence they have seldom found a place in the area of the visual arts, with the exception of artists who continue this tradition in their videos, one example being the Polish filmmaker Józef Robakowski.
In Asia, especially in Japan, there was likewise an important tradition of the abstract film, such as the films of the director Takahiko Iimura (1937-2022), who worked with vividly structured black-and-white sequences, or the films of Takashi Ito (*1956), whose Spacy (1981) already made use early on of the technique of the redundancy of images through inner multiplication in labyrinthine filmic experiences reminiscent of halls of mirrors.[1] But these avant-gardes have for the most part been forgotten and massively overwhelmed by the large film industry dedicated to entertainment.
In the most recent works of Inseong Park, one encounters on the other hand an artistic practice which moves between filmic, photographic and screen images, and which makes deliberate use of the materiality of these various media. For example, his sculptures done in polyester contain poured-in film material, and his pictures on canvas mix celluloid material with oil paints. In turn, his photographically created works have been zoomed up into pictorial size and enter into a discourse with the canvasses.
The artist has explained that the avant-garde films of the 1920s and 1930s by Sergei M. Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov were important for his investigation of abstraction in filmic language; he cites as further influences Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), Jean-Luc Godard’s films, and the cinema of Italian Neorealism from the 1950s and 1960s.
Reference is thereby made to a filmic tradition of abstraction extending from the 1920s to the 1970s and involving abstractly composed focusings, filmic montages, and experiments with light and tracking shots.
At the same time, Park was irritated by the continuation of the visual language of the early avant-gardes in the 1930s: for example, in the case of Leni Riefenstahl, whose films promoting National Socialist, German propaganda he encountered during his time of studies in Nuremberg. In this instance, the interpretation of abstract filmic language as ideologically advanced and democratically enlightening was corrupted. At the same time, the interconnection between pictorial language and representation had become explicit and questionable in equal measure.
Early on, the writings of authors such as Siegfried Kracauer and Marshall McLuhan directed an extensive and critical reflection towards film as a medium and as a conveyor of meaning.[2] And yet we continue to observe and to criticize the phenomenon of deception through images, a tendency that has been amplified further by social media. The question as to how we can know what we believe ourselves to know has become a central issue in the pictorial and media sciences as well as in our everyday experience of the media.
This question is also relevant to painting, which long ago lost justification for laying claim to being a faithful rendition of nature and presenting an idealistic truthfulness. Inasmuch as painting has come in the meantime to be derived from photographic and digital sources, the provenance of the picture has also become uncertain. Park Inseong proceeds from this uncoupling of cause and pictorial effect by making use for himself of the thereby-attained freedoms.
Against the background of today’s digital media and the discussion about artificial intelligence, the works of Inseong Park seem almost conservative, inasmuch as they continue to arise out of a manageability and craftsmanship in handling materials. Park is still or once again an artist who works with the material and makes aesthetic decisions which he would scarcely be inclined to hand over to an algorithm.
In the elaborate processes of his pictorial production, he separates fragments of a picture, enlarges them, cuts them, and creates out of the pieces new pictures, as in the series of Films done from 2019 to 2021. The procedure remains visible on the pictures through the edges of contact sheets with their typical markings. Moreover, through a diagram in the catalogue he brings to light his procedure, which does not remain a mystery but instead proves to be an objective and plausible approach. This unpretentious artistry is situated in proximity to the technology with which it works, inasmuch as it gives stronger emphasis to objectifiable than to subjective aspects of his art.[3]
Through the material use of digitally created images, Park ushers art into a renewed interplay between the digital and the analogue; but this time, the sides seem to have been reversed. It is not the digital image but instead the newly created, material work which presents a weight and an object. Inasmuch as in conversation the artist observes that the digital world “is losing weight and shadow,” his works can also be read as the attempt, in surroundings that have become so weightless and shadowless, to once again have haptic experiences which he makes available to others.
This reflects the tension with which we increasingly find ourselves to be confronted: Because we spend more and more time in virtual worlds that release us from gravity even as they deprive us of physical movement, there is a growing desire for genuine experiences. This includes a certain nostalgia for the days of childhood and for a life in the countryside near large urban centers, as well as a new enthusiasm for artisanal talent, for works based on wood and textiles, and also the crossover between art and handicraft.
Furthermore, the pictures and sculptures of Park Inseong play with transparencies and opacities. The transparent celluloid of the film material gives rise to colors, but it maintains a hermeneutic impenetrability, inasmuch as it does not depict anything. Poured into the sculptures made of polyester resin are parts which, because of the foldings in the material, only yield fragments of the surface. In order to present them, the artist created especially elaborated pedestals out of wood or metal. Through these complex forms, he enhances the aspect of a demonstrative showing of something that cannot be fathomed.
On the other hand, this illegibility means that the dimensions of an explicit and special materiality and coloration increase in importance. The alternation between transparent and milky colors and vivid contrasts, the haptic variations between synthetic resin, wood, metal and cloth, and such procedures as zooming out, cutting and layering all contribute to the sensory variety in the pictures and objects of Park Inseong. He selects diverse formats—from the small formats of the series Inscapes past the circular Cases measuring 92 cm in diameter (both works from 2023) all the way to the large formats of this past year—with regard to their specific impacts. A large number of techniques applied to the image serving as point of departure—whether a drawing, a photogram, a scan or a canvas with paint—are interwoven. In 2020 through the cross-fading of the presented images with colored video projections in It scattered and turned red, the differentiation of the media became an overflowing spatial work of art.
In their processual nature, Park’s pictures become events whose quality of abundance is in some cases indicated by the titles, as with the series Stuffed Moments from 2022.
The most recent works from this year offer demonstrative evidence regarding the history of their evolution into pictures through acts of pressing and layering as well as through different ways of treating their surface. Printed paper is glued onto canvas and covered with epoxy resin, as in the picture 2407005 Lycoris Spamigera from 2024, whose title refers to a type of lily also called “surprise lily” in German, because in springtime it grows and blooms quickly, as if out of nothingness. Through the use of resin and the production through pourings, as well as through often-arising, plastic-resembling islands and transparencies, these pictures evince similarities to the optics of filmic material.
The hybrid nature of the pictures of Park Inseong, their development out of different media, transports what has become our everyday, multilayered and constantly moving perception. Even if Park proceeds in an experimental manner, he repeatedly finds a form that is capable of convincing us. The pictures are like occurrences which, as in the flow of our lives, take on a provisional form only to be pushed aside by others with the passing of time. Nonetheless, they prove in retrospect to have been significant moments and accordingly remain contoured and fixed in our memory.
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[1] See T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, Wahrnehmung und Film, edited by Carina Plath, exhib. cat. Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster 2010.
[2] Doubtlessly of primary importance are the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964) and The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (1967) and Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (1960).
[3] See the excellent essay by Jeong Binna, “Regarding the Changes and Painting of Mental Images Depicted by the ‘Scangraphy’ of PARK Inseong,” in Park, Inseong, The far side of the moon, exhib. cat., Solgeo Art Museum, Gyeongju, Korea. pp. 10-12.