Untitled

In Untitled, Seong Keun Park appropriates works by court painters supported by wealthy patrons during the Renaissance, or by kings and nobles in the age of Classicism. At first glance, these portraits—the very height of splendor and elegance—seem to register the desires of their subjects. Yet as works that begin in oil paint culminate in increasingly lavish adornments of gold leaf, one is led to realize: “This was the painters’ own desire.” Given that the patrons were the ones whose approval mattered, the painters’ desire to gain recognition through their work compelled them to heighten the splendor of those portraits. Ironically, however, as that splendor is amplified through repeatedly layered forms, the portraits do not arrive at the height of beauty; instead, they become grotesque figures.

Here, the face—the core of portraiture—is caricatured as an animal, while the animals, too, possess the splendor of ornament and come to occupy a status equal to that of humans. Rather than suggesting the humanization of animals, this is where the works reveal humans as members of the animal world, and suggest that all animals possess an instinct to make the desires of others their own.

In this respect, the dual use in Untitled of oil paint as a traditional painting material and the digital as a data-based medium is particularly suggestive. Data—the plural form of datum, meaning “material” or “information”—is not material in the traditional sense: a substance with volume and mass. Yet data’s constant circulation makes it an apt medium for suggesting that desire, too, circulates and amplifies. Likewise, the exhibition’s strategy of appropriating masterpieces reconstitutes images as new works through a process of data-based re-editing. In this way, appropriation—understood as a new narrative—becomes an important aesthetic strategy in Seong Keun Park’s Untitled.

Across every era, desire has appeared in varying forms and registers, and art has never existed in isolation—just as our own desires shift with the times and in response to the directions society demands. Through the appropriated masterpieces presented in Seong Keun Park’s Untitled, viewers are invited to examine the codes of desire embedded in classical elegance, while also taking pleasure in discerning what has been rendered in the artist’s own brushwork and what has not.