SUYEON PARK

Park was born in 1963. She graduated from Daegu National University of Education and completed an MA in environmental education at Joongbu University. She taught in primary schools for close to thirty-five years, nine in North Gyeongsang Province and twenty-six in Gyeonggi Province. Silent Face, begun in 2024, came out of that time. Park has written that she spent her childhood keeping a private hurt from view, holding her feelings behind a wall of her own, and that she later found herself watching the children in her classrooms who said little and drew back, recognising in their silence the child she had been. She hoped they would not stay behind such walls as long as she had. Reaching another person’s interior, she found, is never simple; the wish to come closer and the distance she could not finally cross is where the series began.

Shelter and Barrier

The wall carries both meanings at once. It is the accumulated trace of hurt and self-protection, formed over years, and it is the boundary that keeps connection out. Park builds it by layering gel medium, stone powder and acrylic into a hard ground. In some works she mixes gelstone with acrylic and thins gesso over it, producing the obdurate, worn surface of something long weathered. Oil stick and oil pastel are laid over one another to deepen the emotional register of the colour. Elsewhere she works glitter into the ground, so that an ornamental wall moves the eye quickly toward the figure it surrounds. No two walls are alike in colour, thickness or texture, and the wall takes up most of each canvas — for a painting about a face, an unusual distribution of attention.

The Narrow Opening

The wall is never sealed. What remains is a narrow gap: a space through which the figure can barely draw breath, and a passage through which it attempts to turn toward the world outside. Park paints the face there in oil, using her own preparation of stone powder, linseed stand oil, alkyd medium and impasto powder to build volume that stands above the surface. The faces are taken from dolls. She works closely from their particular structure, pushing modelling back through gradation to establish depth, varying the pressure of the brush to separate planes and light, and loading highlights on thickly in white. For the colour of hair and lips she mixes pink, violet and orange pigment into Liquin, using it to raise saturation and as a translucent glaze.

The light is set beneath the chin, running upward against its usual direction, its saturation pushed to the limit with luminous yellow. It brightens part of the face and leaves a deep, heavy shadow beneath the eyes, so that brightness and darkness are held together in a single face. The lips stay closed and the eyes look straight out, offering neither an answer nor any easy consolation. Park has said she does not want the faces read as one fixed story: what each has endured is left to the memory of whoever stands in front of it. Park intends to extend the series beyond painting, into relief, object and installation.

Exhibitions

Park’s first solo exhibition, Silent Faces, was held at Art for Art Gallery, Daejeon (2026). Group exhibitions include The Sense of Light, LEON GALLERY, Seoul (2026) and 2026 Global Artist: Drawing a Dream, Maru Art Center, Seoul (2026). Her work has been shown at the 17th Bank Art Fair, SETEC, Seoul (2026), and is forthcoming at Seoul Art Show, COEX, Seoul (2026

Text courtesy Seoul Art Now.