| Korean painter Shin Hye Park’s recent solo exhibition at New York’s Broadway Gallery can only be described as eloquent. A showcase for her ongoing series of carefully cropped vistas of ocean tides caressing sandy shores, the show evidenced a Zen-like sensibility in theme, style, and curatorial approach. The paintings themselves, almost obsessive in their unyielding preoccupation with the sea, waves, and deserted beaches, together produced a powerful sense of the passage of time through a series of slow motion freeze frames. Walking through the exhibit was like taking a stroll by the sea. Park believes that nature is the point of departure in trying to understand the meaning of life, so it comes as no surprise that she would be drawn to two of mother nature’s basic elements: land and sea. Her minimal palette—sandy whites, stormy grays, salty aquamarines—also speaks to her thematic preoccupation. | 
|
Jill Smith
Courtesy of artist.Korean painter Shin Hye Park’s recent solo exhibition at New York’s Broadway Gallery can only be described as eloquent. A showcase for her ongoing series of carefully cropped vistas of ocean tides caressing sandy shores, the show evidenced a Zen-like sensibility in theme, style, and curatorial approach. The paintings themselves, almost obsessive in their unyielding preoccupation with the sea, waves, and deserted beaches, together produced a powerful sense of the passage of time through a series of slow motion freeze frames. Walking through the exhibit was like taking a stroll by the sea. Park believes that nature is the point of departure in trying to understand the meaning of life, so it comes as no surprise that she would be drawn to two of mother nature’s basic elements: land and sea. Her minimal palette—sandy whites, stormy grays, salty aquamarines—also speaks to her thematic preoccupation.
Conceptually, Park’s minimalist approach suggests a penchant for the symbolic and the abstract, and it would be a mistake to label her a photorealist or a landscape painter. Through her simple yet decidedly sophisticated canvases, she succeeds in apprehending a sense of spirituality, a communion with God or another higher being that one may experience in meditation. Much like the Tibetan monks who focus all of their attention on one mandala for extended periods of time, Park draws a singular focus upon the image of the sea, in all of its detailed minutiae. Though seemingly unchanging, the elements of water, sand, and sky are actually in a constant state of mutation. With each lapping of a wave, each washing of the shore, and each change of tide, the colors and shapes of the natural environment are altered, and Park seeks to capture its ephemeral moods.
The exhibition itself was installed with great curatorial sensitivity and presented the paintings in a manner that highlighted their subtle effects. Hung salon-style in groups of three or four, each small canvas was allowed to resonate with the others around it while still functioning as part of a larger meditation on how inner visions can translate into external representations and vice versa.
Ultimately, it is a sense of equilibrium that Park seeks to express, and she equates this sense of inner peace and quiet balance to the attainment of a “divine state.” The fact that these realist paintings transform themselves before our eyes into abstractions in which we perceive not only the images themselves, with all their subtle variations of color and form, but also the feelings of solitude and pensive contemplation they engender, speaks to Park’s ability to capture the spiritual on canvas.
