MEENA PARK

MeeNa Park, BK7, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 160 cm

Mixing all the colors together results in black. However, if you layer blue over green and layer red over that, and then layer yellow on top of that, the resulting color is ambiguous. Through the interactions of colors layered on top of each other, a different compound of colors forms. At the point where the colors we know lose their clarity, as colors increasingly bleed into each other, a different kind of brightness and chroma is created, leaving us with a different temperature and texture of color.

As one color leads to another amid the repeating circles of colors layered over each other, new colors—subtly different from each other in shade—begin to form. Park MeeNa’s BK series is not a depiction of colors disappearing into blackness; it’s an expression of the nuanced variances in color that occur when the primary colors of green, blue, red, and yellow are layered onto each other. The “BK” in the series name needs to be approached not as an abbreviation for “black” but as a byword that refers to the ambiguous shades that are derived from other colors being stacked on top of each other.

MeeNa Park, Mon-Ami Soft ball 0.7, Pen on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm

The same situation can be found in the artist’s pen drawings. For example, where does the boundary of the color we know as “blue” begin, and where does it end? Park completed drawings, each using one of several blue pens (ready-made products manufactured by various companies) and exhibited them alongside her other works. The disparities between the pens’ colors and their physical properties create unfamiliar lines that demonstrate how even something as familiar as a pen can create a foreign visual experience. We think we know the color blue, but as we continue to look, things become less clear. As we view the crowd of blue drawn with blue pens, we realize that the concept of blue is actually a wide spectrum filled with nuance, and pen companies create their own version of blue within that spectrum. The act of looking creates tiny fissures in our firm belief that we know what a certain color is.

If the BK series can be described as variations in circles of color, Park’s pen drawings are a different kind of monochrome formed through subtle variations of a color expressed in lines. The straight lines drawn with black, green, blue, or red pens run parallel to each other forever. This arrangement of colors running in parallel collects colors in turn, and the artist draws furniture or the everyday objects found in our living spaces as silhouettes at the ends of these color fields expressed similarly to hues on color charts.

MeeNa Park, BK Blue, 2024, Acrylic on paper, 56 x 76 cm

She looks for paint as if gathering colors, and, to give off an impression of the artist not interfering, she overlaps or arranges the circles or lines in quadrilateral belts to form parallels. It’s likely that these parallels contain the artist’s mathematical thoughts on the averages or functions of colors. The cross section of color is formed by the geometrically basic forms of dot, line, and plane, while the foundations are set in the basic colors of the CMYK and RGB color models. Park MeeNa does not stray far from fundamental forms and fundamental colors. Instead, she strives to faithfully depict fundamental shapes and colors on a flat plane. These layers of color that employ simple and plain colors to express eclectic nuances shake up the complacency of our visual perception through the sensation that they are the same but different and different but the same. 

Song Art Gallery
Acrovista Arcade, 188, Seochojungang-ro, Seocho-gu, Seoul, 06600, Republic of Korea
82 2 3482 7096

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