Landscape of Darkness: Park Mi Kyoung

Landscape of Darkness

In my work, I have been painting with the theme of “ambiguous places”. The spaces I depict may appear realistic at first glance, but on closer inspection, they often feel unreal, indistinct. Because of this, my works are primarily expressed through large axes of light. At certain points designated by the direction of the light, darkness reemerges like a cave, and the outwardly scenic expression gradually transforms into an inward, introspective one. 

Landscapes resembling caves are divided into light and darkness. Light exists to reveal darkness, and darkness exists for the sake of light. We always wander and falter between light and darkness, yet it is precisely through this that life continues. 

— Park Mi Kyoung (Translated by Gallery Chosun)

Uncertainty as a Medium of Communication – Between Abstraction and Representation

In Park Mi Kyoung’s paintings, tracing the process is as important as experiencing the final result. At first encounter, one may be overwhelmed by the dark, weighty, and surreal landscapes she presents. But as we move closer, the seemingly aggressive black expanses reveal themselves to be clusters of short strokes; compulsive movements accumulated over time. Should her paintings, completed through countless brushstrokes, be called abstract, or, setting aside the process, can they be termed landscapes in a retrospective sense? The artist herself does not assign a definitive classification. 

Fundamentally, her focus lies in tracing how forms emerging from individual brushstrokes organically meet and interact with one another. At the same time, she evokes the idea of “landscape” not as a literal representation of nature, but as a conceptual image. The resemblance to supernatural landscapes that might appear in a fantasy film is interpreted through the viewer’s perceptual framework, independent of the artist’s own intention. 

Historyless Dreamlike Painting

Park’s paintings are composed of intermittent lines and repetitive actions, almost like performing a ritualistic ceremony. As mentioned earlier, the world she could only draw mentally during a period of post-accident paralysis was a timeless, unreal place. Forms that resemble nature but are unrelated to it, images that emerge spontaneously as one line meets another, producing shapes reminiscent of natural phenomena. 

Hovering somewhere between abstraction and representation, her work seems to be a practice of “painting” as a mode of survival for the artist herself. Approaching these unreal landscapes, which appear as if lifted straight from a fantasy film, one eventually realizes that all was illusion. What remains are a few lines, layers of brushstrokes forming an abstraction. This moment of recognition is perhaps the truest way to approach Park Mikyung’s paintings. 

— Chung Hyun (Translated by Gallery Chosun