Se Yoon Park Solo Exhibition
Light, Darkness and the Tree
September 10th – November 20th 2016
481 Van Brunt Street #9D (4th Floor), Brooklyn, NY 11231
By appointment only – contact info@seyoonpark.com
Se Yoon Park was trained as an architect at the Yonsei University in Seoul and Columbia University in New York, an education that led to a stellar career in the profession, working for OMA, BIG, FR-EE, and REX. Leaving the profession after 10 years, he sought in sculpture an immediacy and universality of expression. As an artist he has found a voice of his own, communicating the ever-evolving eternal through a language of darkness and light.
Drawing upon his architectural design sensibilities, Park began his exploration on light and darkness through hand casting, molding, and three dimensional computer modelling. Engaged in a reflexive dialogue between analog and digital, Park arrived at a final form both precise and organic. Deceptively simple, one realizes upon scrutiny the complexity of the shape, and its stubborn elusion of comprehension in two dimensions.
Light and Darkness captures movement within stillness – the surface contorts, splits, disappears into edges, every view differing ever so slightly from the one before. Set under a natural skylight, the changing position of the sun sets the work into motion, making one believe it is alive.
In And Tree of Life, Park aggregates multiple units of Light and Darkness in a bond-free cantilevered system, creating an assembly of parts in delicate equilibrium. The tree exists as an allegory for life, and in its structural and visual ephemerality demonstrates the passage of time encased in the transition of light.
The main medium being light and darkness, the work is realized in a variety of materials, each exploited for their inherent materiality. Wood, steel, and Polyurethane Resin perform to their structural strengths, while Ceramic and 3D printed Polyamide are employed to capture and diffuse the light on their own terms, providing an array of canvasses for Park to experiment on as he introduces color into his vocabulary with medium specific surface treatments.
A labor of love and self-expression, Light, Darkness, and the Tree is a perpetual work in progress, a work of ever increasing complexity and refinement. The work and the artist breathe together, growing with every iteration.
