A Meeting Place

About

The told and the untold - A Meeting Place: Park Kyung Ryul Solo Exhibition by Ronnie Hsu (Independent Curator) 

The moment when you walk into the gallery, the show begins. A meeting place is Park Kyung Ryul’s second solo exhibition in London, which the artist turns the whole gallery into what we can see as a huge “installation” by creating the interaction between each works and even each part of the space.

Unframed paintings hung high above the human eye level or overlapped with one another; sculptures placed directly on the ground without plinths - the works are not confined to their own sizes as the boundary expands to the whole gallery. Each work can be presented individually, but all together, it allows the artist to convey the idea of her own narrative system.

It starts from words she come across in news. By taking the specific words out of the context, and realising them in her works, the artist deconstructs the text, and breaks the correlation within it, in order to highlight the word itself to further consider the core meaning hiding underneath and how it affects our mundane lives.

‘Spinning’ is the theme that runs through all the objects in this exhibition. The artist picked up the word from the news articles of the tragic Grenfell fire, which left hundreds of people homeless and at least 80 people dead in the deadly blaze earlier this year in West London.

Things in newspapers seem generalised. Whether is a good news or an excruciating one, putting them down in black ink on paper, it describes our everyday life in a rather emotionless way. That is to say, everything in the news become a story of 5W1H - a story of who did what in where at when of why, and by how. It's plain, blunt, or in other word, even on every stories happening around us. Meanwhile, the truth is nothing is even in our world.

Taking the word ‘spinning’ out of its context, it is the sense of word and our recognition to the meaning of it that the artist manages to capture. It would be somehow far-fetched if a viewer immediately identifies this core of the show, as the artist has completely deconstructed the word and put it in an abstract and obscure way with her subconsciousness, which is very much influenced by the style of 18th century novelist Laurence Sterne.

With the idea of creating under the stream of her unconsciousness, it allows the artist to produce something purely in her own perception with the subject in mind. During this process, the word detached from its original meaning, but as it still derives from it, a hint of the word remains.

In Park KyungRyul’s shows, you see movements in the paintings, the figures of spinning object on canvas; you cannot help but move around your eyes to follow the invisible lines that the artist uses to link and hold the objects all together. The exhibition is a web the artist spins, and you are trapped ever since the beginning.