Byoung-Choon Park. Collected landscape

Ca 'Foscari Esposizioni - Ca' Foscari University of Venice hosts, from 9 May to 30 August 2015, Collected landscape, the first solo exhibition in Italy of the South Korean Byoung-Choon Park (1966, Youngdong), edited by Hyun Joo Choe, eleven large-scale works, including paintings and installations. The exhibition is scientifically coordinated by Giuseppe Barbieri and Silvia Burini, professors of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, in collaboration with Vincenza D'Urso, a professor of the Department of Asian and Mediterranean African Studies of the University Ca 'Foscari, and director of the office of the Venetian King Sejong Institute, South Korean government institution that spreads and promotes the language and culture of the Asian country abroad.
Collected landscape wants to deepen the research of the last five years one of the most representative artists of South Korea. Byoung-Choon Park, which since the nineties focused on an experiment aimed at overcoming the boundaries of traditional Korean art, mixed impressions travel, natural spectacles, revisited areas of Google Earth, contemporary sensibility and ancestral memories, with unusual perspectives and alienating. In his paintings, the artist introduces a breakthrough in classical painting, inserting references to daily life, as people and objects, related to both the collective experience - in some cases taken from episodes of the news - both in his personal life. The landscapes represented by Byoung-Choon Park could be called "space-time", places of memory and experience. In his works the human presence is often evoked through items on a small scale and color, which clearly contrasts with the vastness of the scenarios Natural black and white: a reality emerges indistinct that, in his being present at the same time and not familiar, can generate a subtle uneasiness in the viewer background. One example is the work The memory of red cliff (2015), where a vast rocky stretch appear a red sofa and two blue birds. In recent work, featured in the series Landscape with a road, Park began to use images taken from Google Earth that have allowed him to reach different results: through aerial photographs fact the landscape can lose every connotation of three-dimensionality, becoming a fully two-dimensional representation. Again, subtle colored elements appear in the background of the painting in black and white: paratroopers, flowers, houses etc. The binding of Byoung-Choon Park with the history of his country, South Korea, it is also revealed in the technique used in the works: his painting shows, in fact, the use of Muk, a traditional type of ink used in the East. The artist, however, leads to the extreme their search by choosing to adopt a single type of stroke for each work. At the center of the trail it is exposed to a large installation of over 25 meters in length, Collected landscape (2015), crossed by the visitor, and designed specifically for the spaces of Ca 'Foscari. The work consists of more than 130 sheets of paper with patterns shan shui - style of Chinese painting dating from the fifth century, where the most frequent subjects are mountains, rivers and waterfalls, made with ink and brush - hanging from meat hooks on steel pipes. It is a kind of mirror of the overall nature of Korean culture, which has its roots in fifteen centuries of eastern figurative tradition. Finally, another large installation closes the exhibition, Plastic bags landscapes (2015): operates a strong visual impact made up of black plastic bags of various sizes. The landscape images are reproduced here in three dimensions through the use of plastic, with its different forms and a special play of light, representing the South Korean mountains and canyons, dear to the artist, creating surreal atmospheres. Here, as in the paintings, there is a trace of realism with a small red plane flying over the surface of the work. THE CATALOGUE The exhibition Collected landscape will be accompanied by an e-book, in Italian, English and Korean, containing a rich iconography and texts of Giuseppe Barbieri, Byoung-Choon Park, Hyun Joo Choe, Martina and Alessandro Flaborea Zuin.
The exhibition is presented by Cené International and Infinity Art & Culture Promotion, two organizations involved, through cultural activities and exhibitions, in the development of international relations for the knowledge, promotion and development of excellence in Italian and Korean. Cené International is active in Korea since 2007 where, again in collaboration with Infinity Art & Culture Promotion, has carried out numerous projects for the use and distribution of productive excellence of our country. For several years he has grasped the value and importance of bilateral activities to raise awareness in Korea Italian arts and crafts and promotion in Italy of the latest expressions of artistic culture in Korea. Collected landscape with Ca 'Foscari Esposizioni, Cené International, in collaboration with the University of Venice, creates the conditions for closer cultural synergy between Italy and Korean through workshops, conferences and exhibitions to program both in Italy and in Korea. The meetings will focus mainly on the organization of exhibitions and events and provide for the participation of young artists and curators who will get in touch with prestigious museums and university Italian.

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