Behind the color: Park Kyung jin
At the Site, in the Painting, and at the Boundary
When I first encountered Park Kyungjin’s paintings in 2017, I remember being overwhelmed by the massive landscapes that filled the wall. The spectacle of the image was so strong that it felt as if the space where I was standing was being absorbed into the painting. The scene showed a worksite, with several workers in the middle of painting. The sense of immediacy created by the detailed structures must have left a strong impression on viewers standing in front of the work at the time. From this perspective, the scale of the images Park created then seems to have been a key element.
If we look at the image as a layered structure, the experience can be understood in another way. The most basic layer is the real space that forms the background of the image, shown as the gray ceiling and lighting equipment of a photography studio, mostly placed in the upper part of the canvas. The temporary wall built for filming becomes another fictional layer as it is painted by the artist and the workers, transforming a bleak warehouse into a constructed space at the center of the image. In the lower part of the canvas, the workers responsible for the painting are placed, revealing their shared reality across the temporary wall.
Even when the painting is completed and installed in an exhibition space, this layered sense of space continues to function. Like the workers painting on set, the viewer stands in a layer of real space, looking into an illusion through the canvas. The viewer becomes aware of both the exhibition ceiling above the painting and the floor where they stand in front of it. In this way, we experience a painting that naturally builds a structure while intervening in real space.
In early 2019, I encountered his work again in his studio. The images still depicted scenes of painting on the surface of temporary walls. At the same time, compared to earlier works, the colours were much brighter and the brushwork more bold. Although the subject remained a worksite, the smaller canvases felt less about physical presence and more about painting itself. Through this shift in scale, it became clear that the way the artist engages with the idea of the “site” had changed.
Since 2016, Park Kyung jin has taken his workplace as the subject of his paintings, mainly film or music video sets located in Namyangju. At these sites, countless fake scenes are built and then dismantled. The walls he and other workers paint are ultimately disguised as real locations within the finished video image. This act of painting for a living was, in many ways, not so different from facing a canvas and painting as an artist.
For this reason, when he first began using these sites as subject matter, he felt the need to separate the painted image as an artistic act from painting as labour for survival. After finishing his daily work, he personally photographed the scenes of the site and later transferred them onto canvas. Within the canvas, where he sought to fully claim the image as his own, the worksite was transformed from lived space into subject matter.
The works from 2016 and 2017 are relatively descriptive. Their dark, heavy colours convey a sense of gravity rooted in reality. By revealing the atmosphere of the site as directly as possible and emphasizing the struggle of working with the demand of livelihood, these paintings seem to reflect his attempt to distance himself from the site. As both its observer and an artist.
Looking back to Park Kyung jin’s early period, from 2012 to 2015, the theme of “survival” was already central to his work. This was closely tied to a series of real-world events he confronted, including the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and major domestic incidents such as the Guui Station accident, which exposed the human cost of systemic failure. At the time of the radiation leak, fear surrounding seafood reached an extreme, and the artist, who was working part-time at a fish shop, lost his job, facing an immediate threat to his livelihood.
The experience marked a major turning point in how he viewed the world. He later recalled that he had little interest in social or political issues before then. While he remained within the protective boundaries of school, these concerns felt distant and abstract. After graduation, however, such problems rushed in all at once. In response, he began to paint gloomy, politically charged images that reflected the anxiety of the times. Yet the deeper he delved into sites of man-made disaster, the more overwhelming it became to reproduce this collective fear through his own hands. The exhaustion that built up through repeated research gradually shifted his focus toward subjects closer to his own life.
To address his immediate economic hardship, he entered the world of manual labour, and his surrounding environment became the subject of his paintings.
After 2018, the noticeably brighter colours and more open, fluid brushwork functioned almost as a declaration of intent: a refusal to keep labour on site and artistic practice separate. By observing and intervening in the organic mutability of the set, where walls shift, transform, appear, and disappear, Park came to realize that his own rigid distinction between work as labour and work as art was limiting. He began to understand that he could allow himself greater freedom within the space of the painting.
His use of colour grew bolder, Saturation and brightness increased, and the sense of weight that had grounded earlier works gradually lifted. At first, the set functioned as an opposing force to his artistic ideals, treated as a structure of conflict within his life. Yet onto the canvas, which should have been the space of complete freedom, he poured this very site even more actively. The set’s fluid and organic forms were fully reconfigured as the artist’s own way of confronting the canvas, becoming an extension of his attitude toward painting itself.
From that point on, the set became a driving force that enabled Park to paint. It helped him overcome the limits he felt in his practice, to the extent that he has said he even “owes a debt to the set”. The change he chose was to hold on to the idea that his act of painting could maintain a shared language and attitude under any conditions. As a result, the site entered his work more actively, and the scenes brought into the canvas gradually shifted away from descriptive representation toward greater abstraction.
At the same time, he continued to disrupt the abstract surface by placing figures through which his real self could overlap with the image. While the painting may depict a vast space and simultaneously reduce it to an image, there is always someone struggling within that space at points where the viewer’s gaze comes to rest. This can be read as a gesture that restrains the work from becoming pure flat abstraction. Alongside this, Park expanded his physical freedom in front of the canvas, using colours that seem detached from the actual site or reconstructing real set structures through collage-like arrangements within the painting.
These choices allowed the sense of site to be transplanted into the work as a more subjective, active presence. As a result, his method no longer depended on interactive relationships with the surrounding exhibition space or on the scale of the painting itself, allowing him to move more freely beyond size and context.
As the painted surfaces of temporary walls from film sets are transferred onto canvas, they are rearranged through altered colours and compositions that differ from reality. As the image becomes more unreal, the viewer’s gaze eventually meets this figure and exits the world of illusion. The figure anchors the image.
At the same time, the artist wonders what his relationship to painting will be when the moment comes to leave this labour site. He questions how his subject matter might change. His current work involves creating images that are not reality, yet this labour is also part of filmmaking, a process that invites viewers to project themselves into a scene and reflect on emotion and events. If his identity has been reflected through the site of labour, he asks where and how his presence might appear once he leaves it.
Even if Park moves on from this site and chooses different subjects, there will always be lived events within his paintings, and views will continue to project their own lives onto them. Whether he will find a way to fully separate himself from labour or instead continue to show the ongoing coexistence of art and labour in different forms, remains unknown. Either outcome will be compelling.