Jina Park’s painting can be regarded as a strategy responding to the crisis of pictorial experience. In a world overwhelmed by an excessive flood of images—most of which are produced and consumed through digital media—it is by no means easy for painting to carve out a place for itself within the universe of images. From this perspective, Park’s paintings appear to be sensitively aware of themselves as images. After the era when painting played a leading role as a medium depicting or reproducing external reality has passed, it is hardly necessary to emphasize that painting’s sharp self-awareness as one among many media has become customary. However, approaches to painting’s ‘mediality’ need not be uniform. It goes without saying that today’s painting is identified as painting precisely because it produces images distinct from those of other media, rather than being merely images about reality (相). Painting-images can generate experiences unique to painting by revealing their distinctiveness as images within an image world that regards photographic images, film images, pixel images, and so forth as equivalent. When coordinates aiming for such pictorial experiences are established, we will pay close attention to those paintings.

Jina Park’s series ‘The Collector’s Room’ reveals much through its title. First, it suggests that painting can no longer serve to depict external reality or reproduce internal worlds, instead listing iconographies that, in Park’s paintings as already image-ified objects, seem to nestle somewhere in the corners of Western art history. When the artist clearly presents classical motifs of Western painting or sculpture on the canvas, it appears to carry a certain cynicism. Just as a search engine statistically offers average images upon entering a name, the images and sculptures assumed to fill museums actually take similar forms of iconography. These are collections of images that have been selected, organized, and, above all, gathered. The implication of such collecting is an effort to manufacture one’s identity image. Through this, and borrowing the title of one of the artist’s paintings, there is an attempt to construct a ‘Chamber of Power.’ However, the fact that this is likened not to museum curation but rather to the collecting mania of an enthusiast’s personal collection—the ‘Wunderkammer’—has its reasons. It implies a will to judge these images not as aesthetic truths but as objects embodying the tastes and preferences of a particular cultural subjectivity. In other words, they are merely images loved by their collectors. The Wunderkammer is, after all, a repository of images revealing more about the collector’s subjective taste than about the collected objects themselves.

In this regard, the collection, enumeration, and arrangement of iconographic objects in Park’s paintings prominently highlight the act of collecting. The artist names the space where she gathers her preferred images as a Wunderkammer, thereby demoting these images. Yet the title ‘The Collector’s Room’ evokes another resonance. It seems to suggest that producing painting might be no different from collecting and replicating such images. This is less an attitude toward painting itself and more a metonym for the contemporary experience of image production and consumption. Inevitably, the iconographic motifs appearing in Park’s works resemble objects from image stocks sought by game or animation creators. Of course, these images are cataloged, and the creator selects and places them on her canvas. This indicates that images today are created not as reflections or reproductions of external reality but through the interbreeding of images.

In this light, Park’s painting confronts squarely the predicament of pictorial experience and unabashedly acknowledges that painting deals with images of images. Consequently, Park’s paintings are filled with flat images. The display of flatness that goes against the common-sense trope of two-dimensional painting creating three-dimensional illusions was perhaps the most important characteristic of modernist painting. Park faithfully participates in this tradition while adding her own idiom. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is her use of color. Park’s paintings evoke tapestries. Their flatness does not hesitate to appear as well-crafted illustrations that could be laid on the floor or printed on fabric. This impression is reinforced primarily because she carefully chooses pastel tones as if determined to avoid any excessive stimulus. These calm and even hues distance themselves from paintings that strive to assert subjective affectivity through intense colors and textures to counter photographic realism.

Therefore, the immersion toward pictorial experience in Park’s work likely stems from a sensitive attitude toward the historicity of images. For an artist who adheres to the medium of painting, the greatest challenge is the ability to reveal the autonomy of painting. Yet Park does not particularly strive to preserve this goal of autonomy. More important to her than the mythical illusion of autonomy is the historical condition of images. The artist boldly reveals her postcolonial stance. She avoids making futile pronouncements about painting itself. Her position is to expose and critique the strategies Western art history has employed to produce its classicist images. In this respect, Park’s work is an investigation and exposure of how Western art history has created lists of images to assert its grandeur. However, her method candidly references how we consume images. The artist reduces the dominant representations in the Western image pantheon to ‘thumbnails.’

Consequently, the brilliance of great images falls to the level of crude kitsch. Ultimately, the artist’s approach is full of irony. She uses egg tempera, a pigment that seems to promise the eternity of painting since the medieval era. It is a medium that appears to guarantee a timeless, universal truth. Yet through this paint, the artist evokes digital images that cannot last a moment. In other words, she produces JPEG, GIF, or PNG images painted with the heavy pigments of egg tempera. It is difficult to view Park’s painting without acknowledging the peculiar pleasure generated by this paradox. For this reason, one becomes curious about the subsequent images that will be preserved within her works.

Seo Dongjin (Professor, Department of Convergence Art, Kaywon University of Art & Design)