JIHYE PARK

PART I :
7-27 JANUARY 2010 | Opening Reception: Thursday 7th JANUARY 6-8pm

ARTIST STATEMENT:
Fairy Tales have played a powerful role in my childhood and I believe that of most other people as well. There are lots of lovely stories about princesses with pretty dresses, princes on horseback, animals which can talk and many other adventures: it’s a proper fantasy.

But the Fairy Tales we know from our childhood are not the real Fairy Tale. If we read the stories which these Fairy Tales have come we can find disturbing descriptions of the most horrific of human actions; murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and so on.

‏I am interested in the fantastical, the horrific and the paradoxical elements of the Fairy Tale. Combining these ingredients in a simple recipe I have made my own Fairy Tale. My Fairy Tale focuses upon conventions of sense and the sensibility of relationships. Although I have taken inspiration from music, writers and filmmakers my main source is my own recent personal experiences as well as though historical events that could be seen as rites of passage. Things have stayed with me irrespective of documentation – seared onto my mind for time immemorial. My preoccupation with past events borders on an obsession, I have run through and will run through happened and imagined narratives. Of these hundreds of significant events I have played out thousands of possible outcomes.

In my film the girl is both a character that I’ve made up and something borrowed from Fairy Tales. Using her, I am able to explore hidden human desires that cannot be shown in real life. I am able to maintain a position of innocence and emotional expression at once. This allows me to explore manifold allusions to and implications of sexual intercourse in The Chopped Arm through the pleasant Fairy Tale.

The Sisters and The Sisters II are based on specific elements of my own reality. They portray and elucidate mental landscapes on the crossroad between the conscious and unconscious as played through in memories or in dreams. These films inhabit a space beyond the lines of reality and the present world and verge upon, but do enter sure-footedly, the alternative, surreal enclave. The films are an anti-diatribe on my own meta-narrative. The narratives are outside a temporal space, I do not intend them to be timeless be for them to outside any specific time. They focus upon a mythical sensibility and in an almost real world. The metaphors I use focus upon a romanticism and possessiveness and flit sporadically from one point to another to create an air of the unnerving and unsettling.

My films create their originals retroactively. The lost objects within them are fictional, but are essential for constructing a different reality as they launch desire and in turn desire sustains the whole reality.

The focus of the film is upon the girl taking her sister to the pond, she spends a great deal of time looking at her reflection in the pond. I wanted to highlight the worst, insincere, Romantic elements of narcissism inherent in her. This is also why her sister has the same face as her; it is some ways herself that she is drowning. My intention is to construct a plain rooted in the unconscious, conducive to the evocation of emotional responses comparable to my own.

  





Video stills from The Chopped Arm | Super 8 film transfer with soundtrack on DVD | Duration 8’ 33” | 2008



Installation view of The Bluebird of Happiness | Hand-embroidered on silk, bird cage with feather and video installation | Dimensions: 225cm x 300cm, 75cm x 300cm | 2008

JIHYE PARK
Lives and works in London and Seoul


EDUCATION
2007 ~ 2009 MFA Art Practice, Goldsmiths University of London
2004 ~ 2007 BA Fine Art and Comtemprory Critical Studies, Goldsmiths University of London
2003 ~ 2004 Extension Degree Fine Art and History of Art, Goldsmiths University of London


GROUP SHOWS
2009 New Romance, Ada Street Gallery, London, UK
2009 MFA Art Practice Show, Ben Pimmlot, Goldsmiths College, London, UK
2009 RUSHES Soho shorts Festival 2009, Tenderpix Experimental Tenderpixel Gallery, London, UK
2009 Travelling Along, Waterside Project Space, London,UK
2009 One Hand Clap, Dial Zero, Ada Street Gallery, London, UK
2009 Group/Gopup, Area 10, London, UK
2008 Entry Forms, UK Korean Artists, Korean Cultural Centre, London, UK
2008 The Imaginative Symbolical Composition, Corningsby Gallery, London, UK
2008 RUSHES Soho shorts Festival 2008, Tenderpix Experimental Tenderpixel Gallery, London, UK
2008 Near the Futurism, At Nina`s, London, UK
2007 Goldsmiths Fine Art Show, Goldsmiths collage, London, UK
2007 Chimney and Roses, The Flea-Pit, London, UK
2006 Kick Art, Nolia’s Gallery, London, UK

AWARDS
2009 Short List, Experimental Category, RUSHES Soho Shorts Festival 2009
2008 Short List, Experimental Category, RUSHES Soho Shorts Festival 2008

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