Humanity once believed it could transform lead into gold. We called this belief, this pseudoscience and philosophy of the pre-modern longing for gold, “alchemy.” By definition, alchemy was the challenge of its time and a movement to turn things that are non-gold into gold. With the economic implications aside, the aspiration to chemically transform a particular substance into something totally unrelated may sound ludicrous to many. The advent of modern chemistry did in fact expose the fallacy of alchemy. Although the idea of turning lead into gold is technically no longer a fallacy thanks to the advances in technology, we still treat alchemy as a superstitious field of study. However, if we view alchemy from a philosophical perspective, we may grant a new context that differs from a scientific one.

Hermes Trismegistus referred to alchemy as a metaphor for elevating humankind to divine positions through enlightenment. As such, alchemy should be understood as a part of techne, the overall pursuit of rational activities based on technology, academics, and knowledge, bound by certain set of conventional rules. Furthermore, alchemy shares many similarities with art in that it strives to spiritually lead the non-rational enlightenment of humankind through production activities; much like art, alchemy attempts to occupy both the rational and emotional. In this light, Park Seok Min attempts to take a meta approach to art and thereby share the aesthetic recognition that he strives for and its format. In this attempt, Park has been saving his objects in image data spliced into time-based frames or similar formats. He has also continued to produce flat works that appear to capture multiple surfaces of the object existing within the same span of time. Through such methodology, Park recognizes his objects at the atomic level, emphasizing the need to approach the objects at their most fundamental levels in order to truthfully commune with them. Likewise, in «Melting a Lump Sugar»(BOAN 1942, 2020), Park expands his attitude from individual works to the entire exhibition while projecting the spatial-temporal filter on the boundary of surfaces to naturally evoke such outlook. 

This rather unfamiliar methodology wherein the artist attempts to bridge his works directly with his inner self has manifested into Park’s works in accordance with his deliberate attempts to be both the subject and the object. Unfettered from their orthodox places within the framework of conventional exhibitions, these works also somberly abandon the positions they once held in common aesthetic narratives. And with this, art that always felt so stationary finally began to swirl in motion around the rounded corners of the exhibition space. This unfamiliar movement demonstrates that each flat work has been liberated from the grand telos of exhibition and curation. It proves that a new (ir)rational schema has now defined the relationship between the exhibition, artist, and the audience. Undoubtedly, each work and Park, the artist, is in motion in the exhibition. However, the overall movement ultimately manifests through the multiple layers across the whole exhibition, driving the artist and the audience to twirl along the spiral path and collapse the boundaries between the external and the internal. While the works, the exhibition, the artist, and the audience serve as each other’s conditions for reaction, it is interesting that Park provides for the abstinence from the emotional experience which many would say is standard in contemporary art. This new way of forming a mutual relationship in fact defines the thought process as something standardized, and views the aesthetic mediums as subjectified vessels or bodies of affectation. Therefore, Park elicits true empathy from the vestigial traces that never received significant recognition in contemporary art thus far.

What then, should we see in this stream that makes mobile what was stationary, or the resultant cycles and repetitions, vibrations and waves, and melody and breath? What meaning could come of shedding light on the abstract particulates that we had been otherwise unable to examine with our conventional line of sight? By observing them? By going back to what we may have missed or prompting a reminder about them? This white, rectangular exhibition space with rounded corners is filled with canvases of all shapes and sizes between which are gaps that either comprise continuity or segmentation. It is where the figurative and the abstract, reality and the virtual all exist yet are portrayed only on their surface. Yet in them, we are compelled to see the things which we previously did not consider art, and when we do see them, we find valuable meaning in them. Such obfuscated boundaries of definitions in Park’s exhibition fundamentally subvert the activities of creating and appreciating art, and furthermore, the notion of subject and object. This paradoxical coexistence of collision and evasion of the mutually interrelated segmentation, the assembly and departure of the nomadic iconography, and the rationality of the antinomic reasoning are justified due to the possibility of this subversion.

Focusing on what should be seen, felt, and given in each of our separate or collective places, Park’s works seek to become another object in their own right instead of mere mediums that represent something else. This domain of paintings which would simultaneously enable the works to serve as both the subjects and the objects may also be inclusive of the rational possibility of abandoning either status as the subject or object. In that moment, Park’s works obscures the boundary of communication which thus far had remained a domain of compromise, expanding into the domain of eradicated attempts and explosive possibilities. The multi-editing method that Park uses to open this new channel of empathy seeks to shed light solely on the value of truthfulness. Consequently, the multiple layers hidden beneath the airbrushed paint, the duality hidden behind monotony, the harmony between dissonance, the distance and direction between movement and fixation, revelation, hiding, and overlaying bring the non-artistic sensation of physics and engineering into the realm of art; at the same time, it posits a fundamental question at our long held perspective on the position of art.

As can be seen, Park’s works challenge us to reexamine the intersection between paintings and exhibitions by directing our eyes first to the non-paintings (conventionally speaking) and non-exhibitions (of conventional paintings). Moreover, this enables us to view non-art as art and vice versa. Such expansion of the domain of art present in Park’s works probably attributed to my association of his exhibition with alchemy. Dissolving sugar with water would make little difference in the resulting solution, but its taste will be very different. Likewise, introducing air as the solvent to dissolve a solute may keep its physical properties by change the product of the appreciation it emits. Likewise, Park’s metaphysical practice of his art refines the value of a new gold. There, only the determination to transcend beyond the ambiguous and arbitrary appreciation will encounter true mutual understanding. And that is what Park will ultimately reach with clarity. The spacetime wherein we will first encounter the sediments of the things between us has always been here and now.