Fragmented Eden

Dear Jina, your exhibition is entitled “Fragmented Eden”. What do you associate with the word “Eden”? And how and why is this Eden “fragmented”?
Jina Park: One of the most important questions in my work is what constitutes the individual. We live in a time in which misunderstandings, prejudices, hatred and exclusion due to cultural differences are omnipresent, up to and including conflicts and wars. But even on a microscopic level, individual worlds collide on a daily basis, especially in a multicultural city like Berlin, where people of different ethnic backgrounds live together. Within social relationships, different behaviors clash different ways of appropriating culture coexist.What distinguishes humans as a species from others? 

“Fragmented Eden” is a metaphor for this world. 

In the religious sense, Eden stands for the Christian paradise. My Eden is a symbol for the dominant ideology that created the existing order. If you look into the question of which strong beliefs lead to misunderstandings between people, it quickly becomes clear that it is their religious and political views. If you look fur ther into how these beliefs are formed, it leads to the question of how the individual forms and is formed. What I discovered in the process is the concept of “taste”. 

Taste is the mode in which people relate to objects and other people. Through taste, people distinguish themselves from others and are distinguished from others.Taste has a deep impact on our inner being and directly influences our likes and dislikes, our empathies and antipathies, our fantasies and phobias. It creates the unconscious uniformity of a social class. But this world is shattered by the clash of beliefs. We have expelled ourselves from Eden and are entering another world. 

Your world of motifs is characterized by an exotic world of animals and plants. The eye loses itself in the multifaceted green of the foliage of ferns, palm trees or cacti. Recently, the pictorial space has opened up into vast desert landscapes, meeting distant mountain ranges or the summit of the famous Japanese Mount Fuji. Throughout the setting, guenons, flamingos and snakes stand and move on an equal footing with crows, arctic foxes and cranes. How does this mix of equally coexisting worlds of flora and fauna come about in your paintings? 

Jina Park:The above-mentioned reflections on taste reminded me of the concept of the Wunderkammer.The area within the frame of my canvas is my own cabinet of curiosities, filled with images and motifs that I have collected on visits and research.The species that have evol- ved in different climate zones and habitats are “stolen” by me, so to speak, and locked into the canvas.The indigenous and foreign species that live together in this space all have the common characteristic that they are objects that I want to “own”.These collected images and motifs create diverse narratives. 

The coexistence that I depict in my paintings is based on the so-called “moving perspective” from classical East Asian painting. In contrast to traditional Western painting, in which there is a fixed point of view, East Asian painting works with the “flowing gaze”. This means that different angles are depicted simultaneously so that the viewer can move around the picture and view the scenery from different perspectives. The viewer‘s gaze is not fixed. Instead, there is visual freedom to move within the image, with the viewer sliding their gaze from top to bottom, left to right and vice versa to view the different areas of the image from different angles.This format relates to the content and allows different narratives to emerge depending on the viewer‘s cultural background and personal taste.To achieve this, I have defined three positions in my pictures. 

1. the treasure:These are the objects that have the greatest value in the room and are of particular importance to me or the viewer.They are things that we want to own or protect. 

2. the guardian:This is the figure that guards the treasure.The guardian is the protector and ensures that the valuable object is protected from threats.This role can change depending on the situation. 

3. the robber :This is the character who wants to seize the treasure or is fascinated by its value.The robber is the one who breaks into the cabinet of curiosities and wants to realize his own wishes. 

These three positions create diverse narratives through their respec- tive roles and meanings in my paintings.The viewer can reshape the relationship between treasure, guardian and robber based on their own perspectives and interpretations. In this way, the work does not stop at a fixed interpretation, but opens up a multitude of possibilities depending on the viewer‘s cultural background and taste. a multitude of possibilities depending on the viewer‘s cultural background and taste. 

The horse repeatedly appears as a motif in your latest series of works. Compared to the wild animals described at the beginning, the horse is considered domesticated. It serves hu- mans as a utility animal and mount. What message does the horse carry in your imagery? 

Jina Park: When choosing the objects, I don‘t think about a specific narrative or meaning for each element in the picture in advance. As I mentioned before, the horse is also one of the objects I want to own. However, my initial interest was probably in the absurd contradiction I observed at the zoo:The horse may be the only animal tamed and used by humans, but it still lives in captivity.The narrative of each cha- racter only seems to be complete when it meets the interpretation of the audience. 

At the POSITIONS trade fair, your large format painting “Space Oddities” (2024) aroused great attraction and fascination in the audience. Three animals emerge from the ethereal green of the dense foliage of exotic plants: They are a spoonbilled crane, a monkey and a snake. What is the relationship bet- ween these three protagonists? What does the title “Space Oddities” allude to? 

Jina Park: I have made an interesting observation in past exhibitions: Depending on what people believe in (not only in the religious sense), hatred and admiration arise simultaneously when looking at the iconography of, for example, this painting. Some people find the sna- ke so repulsive that they ask for it to be removed from the picture; others are afraid of birds and therefore reject them. In the Christian worldview, the snake is seen as a negative symbol, as the one who drives us out of paradise. In Buddhism, on the other hand, the snake is a protector that guards meditators. 

In Egypt, it plays the role of a guide and is regarded as a sacred being. If you interpret the iconography only from the Christian perspective, which divides the world into good and evil, the image looks very different from the Buddhist worldview, in which there is no distinction between good and evil.The different ways in which we interpret and react to icons lead to the question of how I, as an individual, see the world. And above all, whether this view perhaps represents a form of power that generates superiority and inferiority, admiration and disgust. 

Your paintings also show references to different human cultu- res. There is the horseman in classical tournament dress and majestic posture, the bright white sculptures of Greek and Roman antiquity and Egypt. There are also architectural elements with Arabic arabesques. Are these quotations a statement on the current debate about a revision of post-colonialism, which increasingly tends towards simplification and black-and-white thinking (see Jens Balzer‘s book “After Woke”)? 

Jina Park: Post-colonialism is one of the essential theories to understand my work. I studied traditional Korean painting in South Korea. Unlike students of Western painting, we had many reflections on tradition and various discourses on Korean identity emerged. South Korea experienced 35 years of Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945, during which time there were many interruptions in tradition due to Japan‘s cultural annihilation policy.This affected the entire culture, especially and irretrievably traditional painting. During the period of postmodernism, the discussion about Korean traditional painting was repeated in a way that reopened questions about the limits of Eurocentric Orientalism. 

The cabinet of curiosities is considered an early form of museum.The main function of a museum is to facilitate encounters with foreign cultures and, on this basis, to promote scientific, technical and cultural civilization and globalization. However, many misunderstandings about other cultures also arise in the process of civilization and globalization. Particular attention should be paid to the misunderstandings associ- ated with Orientalism. In European art criticism or art history, artists from theThird World are constantly challenged to present their iden- tity, to appear exotic, to be different or to look like Frida Kahlo.This is a Eurocentric perspective. 

It can be seen in the communication problems between different cultures.The modern idea of art is seen as the product of Western culture, which always poses a dilemma for artists from non-Western regions. Artists from non-Western regions have to choose between “derivation” and showing “otherness”. All too often they are reduced to what sets them apart from the superiority of the European model. During my studies in Germany, I too often felt the pressure to be Asian. We seem to find comfort in categorizing the foreign and unknown. In such a categorization process, a hegemonic and a contrapuntal culture emerge, with the dominant culture finely regulating and controlling the contrapuntal culture. Subtly, power is exercised through the categorization process and forces acceptance of the dominant categories. 

Categorization means there is a constant risk of discrimination and exclusion. My Wunderkammer is based on these dilemmas. It is equally dangerous to believe that two cultures simply merge to create a new culture. Here, too, I find a very complex and subtle power structure. Ideal hybridization requires conditions.These include mutual respect and an awareness that cultural identity is not fixed but always changing. Different cultural elements must constantly clash, collide and be negotiated in order to continuously change and reconstitute themselves. 

Your paintings are characterized by an atmosphere of the absolutely simultaneous and equal existence of things. This is partly due to your use of the stylistic devices of collage and the painting technique of egg tempera. How long have you been working with this type of painting? And what attracts you to it?

 Jina Park: When I came to Germany to study, my first task was to find the right materials and techniques for me. I studied Korean color painting in South Korea and was fascinated by it. During my studies in Leipzig, I happened to have the opportunity to learn egg tempera, which turned out to be very similar to color painting. Apart from the differences in paper and canvas and the binders, the process is very similar. 

I suspect that both techniques have retained features from the evolution of cave painting. The attraction of egg tempera lies primarily in the rendering of the matte, smooth surface.The process is very complex, slow and laborious. But the depth of the colors, which is created by layering, is clearly different from other techniques.The color conservation is also extre- mely robust, similar to Korean color painting, which is another big plus. 

You repeatedly refer to the special relationship between ob- ject and individual, between possession and power. In the digital age, all possessions have become immaterial. The form of the digital right of use places the former “things” in a constant process of changeability. And these immaterial “things” are expected to remain transferable as shares, as Bitcoin, as nft. How do you view this phenomenon? And what significance does the fleeting, immaterial nature of virtual “things” have for your painting and your dialog with the viewer? 

Jina Park: My work includes both images that I have collected myself from certain places and images that I have gathered through internet searches.The freely available images circulating on the Internet are selected by me, transformed into new images on the canvas and finally added to someone‘s art collection as finished valuable works. At the same time, however, these images float in virtual space again and are appropriated by someone else. Hybridity arises within this cyclical irony. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Wunderkammer was introduced to China by Western missionaries and from there reached Korea, then known as the Joseon Dynasty. 

King Jeongjo, a great lover of books, wanted the people to have access to books too. He therefore had painters paint bookshelves, and today we call this art form ‚chakgado‘. The Wunderkammer had a great influence on Chakgado painting at that time, and painters began to immortalize not only books but also various objects in their paintings, which enabled new experimental approaches in traditional Korean painting. 

For the people who could not afford books, these book images offered a way of satisfying their ostentatious desires and intellectual vanity and therefore spread widely.This is linked to the need for intellectual self-presentation and is connected to the concept of the cabinet of curiosities. What I found most fascinating was the idea that people virtually owned the objects by painting them. How the Wunderkam- mer influenced Chakgado, Chakgado inspired me, and this process connected back to the Wunderkammer. Fictional images convey a belief in reality, and people draw their imagination from them.This is how cultures organically influence each other when they pass from one society to another. When different cultures meet, a completely new mixture is created. 

This is not just a simple addition of cultures, but an interaction of the specific characteristics of each culture in a new context to form a new culture.Today, in a digitalized world, this process is further accelerated in a globalized environment. From a post-colonial perspective, power relations such as colonialism have a profound impact on cultural exchange. Colonialism led to an asymmetry in cultural diffusion, with one culture dominating and oppressing the other. However, over time, the oppressed cultures have resisted and re-formed to reemerge in new guises. 

In this context, the cultural cycle also includes the resistance and reconstitution of cultures within power structures.Art is remembered by people both in the past and in the present, both in the digital and in the real world. Ultimately, these memories are organically woven together, which will move humanity forward in a better direction.