Although Sobin Park has exhibited widely and globally, this show marks the first solo exhibition in the United States. Park’s imagery offsets the beautiful against the beastly into a symphony or perhaps a dissonance upon the two extremes. She juxtaposes the scaly darkness of a dragon against the delicate translucent skin of the female beauty embraced by his roughness. The resulting differences in color, texture, content, density, sparseness and the nuanced shades in-between them makes for a very sensuous yet complex oeuvre. Park plays with and engages in a dialogue about beauty and its beholder, or beauty and its perceived opposite; ugliness. Nevertheless, cultural notions of beauty may be relevant in the case of Park who earned her BA and MFA from South Korean universities and has been working there all her life although exhibiting globally. Beauty is after all in the eyes of the beholder and may have been a matter of taste for Kant but in Hegel’s theories of aesthetics taste is not an issue. Perhaps in enumerating the criteria of standard discussions on beauty we need take note that our cultural notion of beauty is a cluster concept including the elements of order and flawlessness.

In Park’s work the beautiful and sublime mix to produce Kantian artistic beauty while because it has Hegelian content is spiritually imbued and gratifies the soul. Consequently, beauty is not a matter of taste alone if it’s deeply imbedded within the psyche of the individual as is the thematic uniformity of Park’s continuous leitmotif. Flawlessness as an idea promotes kitsch and acts within a cluster that when popularly applied is a dynamic of power that is ubiquitously operant and informs the idea of beauty. Thus, we must embrace a freer definition with which to rehabilitate beauty in order to divest it of its embedded moral implications. In other words, we need to recognize the need to separate taste from appreciation. Park’s installation of drawn and painted images is produced to surround the gallery walls stretching out and around the perimeter like the dragon/beast accompanying her beauty. The colors are limited to black, white and red therefore contrasting in hue as well as overall appearance and character. Her human, animal and nature combinations produce hybrids that are inviting in their sensuality but also in their moodiness.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
Exhibitions Director Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos at tvrachopoulos@gmail.com
or
Administrative Director of Tenri Michael Yuge at Yuge@tenri.org