New Body

Wunggyu Park

ARARIO MUSEUM presents New Body, a solo exhibition by Wunggyu Park at Tapdong Cinema’s Project Underground. Park has long explored “negativity”—themes that evoke disgust, fear, and abjection—through various series of works that appropriate the formal structures of religious painting. This exhibition features The Eight Sorrow Events and Nine Stages of Decay, which reinterpret Buddhist iconography and narrative structures to construct pseudo-mythological narratives centered on figures of negativity. These works appear alongside earlier pieces that inspired them, offering a comprehensive view of the artist’s evolving formal attitude and its gradual transformation.

Park’s engagement with negativity originates from his early encounters with religious iconography—images that evoked a sense of oppression and fear, and eventually came to feel like hollow shells, emptied of their original meaning through constant repetition. Appropriating the visual codes of religious painting—long used to reinforce doctrine and regulate life—Park has cultivated a practice that confronts his own sense of negativity and seeks to sublimate it through the construction of his own formal order. In particular, by referencing the compositional logic of Buddhist paintings, he substitutes the originally sacred figures with visceral and abject imagery—worms, bovine intestines, and lowly beings—thereby destabilizing the boundary between jeong (the positive) and bu-jeong (the negative).

His focused interest in Buddhist art was sparked by encountering a classical depiction of Kichijoten—the goddess of fortune—in the Kyoto National Museum. He was later inspired by the Nirvana Sutra’s narrative of Kichijoten and her sister Darkness, a demonic figure who brings disaster wherever she appears. In 2022, Park created Dummy No.81 as part of the Dummy Buddha series, substituting Darkness for Kichijoten while preserving the composition of the original. This work embodies Park’s consistent inquiry into the dualities of ‘jeong’ and ‘bu-jeong’— terms encompassing affirmation and negation, sacred and abject, and normativity and defilement—, and serves as visual and narrative anchors for The Eight Sorrow Events and Nine Stages of Decay series developed thereafter.

The Eight Sorrow Events is a pseudo-mythological series that intertwines the life story of Darkness with the artist’s personal experience of chronic skin disease. Connected narratively to Park’s 2023 work Ten Oxherding Pictures, this series reconfigures the traditional Eight Great Events in the Life of Buddha through the artist’s distinctive formal language and narrative. The central figure is a woman born from a boy who falls asleep after eating a cow. Afflicted with a severe skin condition, she becomes ostracized from society and begins a life of seclusion. As she passes through eight stages of illness, her skin darkens to an inky hue, and she arrives at a form of enlightenment. Hoping to share this realization with others, she reenters the world—but wherever she goes, misfortune follows. She eventually comes to be known as Darkness, and the final scene closes with her solitary death.

Nine Stages of Decay follows the final episode of The Eight Sorrow Events and comprises nine sequential scenes that depict the decomposition and eventual rebirth of Darkness. At the center lies her corpse, swelling with yellow pustules as it begins to decay. The scene unfolds in two directions—upward and downward—each representing a distinct process of transformation. The upper sequence depicts a process of solidification, in which the body condenses into a hardened, egg-like form. In contrast, the lower sequence illustrates dissolution and dispersal. These opposing trajectories ultimately converge in the final scene, where a new body is born. While referencing the structure of the traditional Buddhist Nine Stages of a Decaying Corpse, Park’s Nine Stages of Decay reimagines it as a narrative of dual decomposition—symbolizing the collapse of opposites such as affirmation and negation—culminating in the resurrection of a new corporeal form.

This exhibition presents an interconnected sequence of series that collectively illuminate the formal logic and cosmology Wunggyu Park has developed over time. The progression from Dummy No.81 to The Eight Sorrow Events and Nine Stages of Decay traces the life of Darkness— a symbol of negativity—and the journey of the dead body through opposing processes of hardening and dissolution, culminating in the emergence of a new body. This trajectory encapsulates Park’s ongoing visual inquiry into negativity through the framework of Buddhist painting, while simultaneously marking a shift beyond traditional iconographic references toward the construction of new forms within his own distinctive formal system. Traversing the boundary between jeong and bu-jeong, Park has continually explored a distinctive formal order in which the sacred and the abject, structure and disruption, control and release coexist and intersect. The mythic structures he invents—accumulated and repeated—form the narrative foundation of his internal logic. New Body serves as the culmination of this inquiry, and gestures toward what is yet to come.

ARARIO MUSEUM TAPDONG CINEMA
14,Tapdong-ro, Jeju-si, Jeju-do, Korea
+82 64 720 8201

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