Chunbum Park
Chunbum Park, also known as Chun, was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1991. They came to United States in 2000 and attended Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, TN. In their sophomore year at the University of Rochester, Park decided to become an artist and transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design, where they studied briefly before taking voluntary leave from school. They subsequently studied on and off at the Art Students League of NY before receiving BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2020. Park then completed all of their graduate thesis requirements at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2022, and their MFA in Fine Arts Studio is pending. Park was a participant in the SVA's Summer Residency program in Painting in 2019, and they also exhibited at the One Art Space gallery in Tribeca in 2022. Park's works deal with gender fluidity, anti-racist aesthetics, and Northeast Asian heritage, and they attempt to achieve an ideal image of self as a Northeast Asian (transgender) woman at the level of fantasy through the act of painting. Due to opposition from family and the Korean community, Park only dresses as a woman on special occasions.
Thank you so much!!
Object-ness disintegrate into abstraction. The initial world of form based on Light and shadow introduce us into a world of flat movements and colors upon further examination.
Ohhh I need to read that article! Thank you for pointing this out.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by repeating the image of the Slant Step throughout the painting (which is the Slant Step)? Or are you talking about a new, bigger painting?
The colors are indeed lovely. I can feel the cool air and the sunlight under a blue sky in this painting. The diagonal lines also make for an interesting composition.
This is a very rich use of magenta and crimsons. There is a burst of energy of abstract, expressionistic brushstrokes only to be tamed by the arc at the top. It is a controlled beast. I in fact see a set of light gestural marks evoking a horse at the mid-left edge of the painting. This makes me think that there is an interesting story behind this painting, more than a still life of a flower vase. It reads more as a landscape with figures and symbols than as a still life, in my humble opinion. Especially the arc of the magenta that you may have put in as an accumulation of flower petals reads as a crimson sky or clouds as much as a flower.
There is quite a lot of things going on this abstract painting. There is fragmentation of memory in regards to places, the quality of light, the texture of the buildings and the surfaces, and the rich and sometimes sensuous experiences represented by the thick and abstract colors and brush strokes. It follows the lessons of non-centered-ness of Abstract Expressionism, almost poetic quality that is found in lyrical abstraction, and California bay painters style of colors and buildup of form. And then the vertical and horizontal lines that are fleeting provide a sense of orientation and direction in this mind boggling puzzle of a map of your experiences and ideas. There are both warm and cool colors, but they shine with clarity and towards warmth, mostly. The cool colors are there but only if they exist to cool down the overall warm temperature of the painting. It's as if Judith Linhares (overall warm color palette, and blocky brush strokes) combined with Richard Diebenkorn (abstract expressionism and cool overall color palette) and had a child. This would be the painting.