Whistle is pleased to participate with Min ha Park in Frieze New York's Focus section. The presentation will consist of a display of paintings by Park, installed to mimic the dynamics and rhythms of the metropolis. This will be Whistle's first time attending Frieze New York.
Min ha Park constructs scenes in symbolic units of light, color, and form. By composing a unique and specified iconographical language in her paintings, Park materialises the intangible as a landscape; of memory, sensation, atmosphere, illumination, and the microscopic changes that occur within the oscillating moment. While in the past light and its afterimage have been her medium to render the spiritual landscape, in recent works, Park has turned her attention to its connotations, and how it may be employed simultaneously as signifier and signified.
In this presentation, Park continues her explorations of time and perspective within the symbolic deconstruction of reality. If a tunnel is a structure connecting the past with a predicted future, the 'Underpass' series first examines the Three Namsan Tunnels, evoking the moving geometry of liminal and limitless moments repeated in the back-and-forth through the tunnels nearby the artist's studio. This is also demonstrated in the ongoing 'Nostos'; as she travels the solitary sunrises and sunsets between work and home, Park divides the canvas into recurrent forms and delineates perspective, rendering a scene intimate to the viewer yet wholly unique. A melodic sense of familiarity permeates the composed landscapes, the metallic quality of which is further emphasized by Park's particular use of silver pigment to catalyse the illumination of change within the canvas.
The fluctuation of light progresses in the 'Torch' series. Whereas enlightenment strikes in the flash of passing headlights or suspended windows among corridors, alleys, and fields, here, it materializes in a multiform collective of cigarettes and smoke. Amassed together, they aggregate as crowds of varying appearance and demeanor. In their anonymity, they are reminiscent of the throngs of the cities that Park has driven, walked, and lived.