Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

“Composing Daily Fragments into Poems” is a small-scale exhibition, created in collaboration with two Korean artists. Both of them have developed interactive performance from their medium of painting, to expand painting and generate dynamic, two-way exchange and dialogue. However, be it from the artist’s point of view of the creative practice, or criticism of its topic, the brush stokes, or art history, the perspective of the viewer is a unidirectional, static, and passive reception of the painting’s message. Therefore, the original intention of this project lies in how paintings can generate diverse conversations and extend dialogue with viewers through display. In addition to exploring the possibilities of performance and expression, this project also intends to illustrate scenes of contemporary life and its appearance. The two artists of this project gaze and observe the “appearances of beings,” allowing stories of ordinary folks to accumulate into a narrative breadth of contemporary scenes.

Goyona Jung’s paintings are composed of daily life, such as a car wash parking lot, a softly lit window sill in a dark night... The style is often realistic, with simple, flat strokes, while the acrylic paint is mixed with black, grey or white, showing a tint of melancholy. In contrast to a personal perspective or expression, the series Live Portraits showcases a different style. Jung first invites participants who are willing to speak with her one-on-one, and films the participant’s face while seated opposite. A transparent acrylic panel is installed on the wall, and the artist projects the participants’ videos on the wall, sketching the contours of his or her face, and replacing the panel to sketch the face of another participant, later installing the acrylic panels as one large installation. The color in this work is much brighter, with unmixed acrylic paint, vibrant lines of faces layered on top of each other, as if a brilliant flower in bloom, layer upon layer of blossoming narratives.

There are various series in Kyung Jong Park’s work, including a series that transforms the drawing process into animation, as well as installations and paintings. Generally speaking, his style is a vivid, fantastical world, in which many different objects in the image or exhibition space warp and interact, conveying a sense of science fantasy but also childlike innocence. Park outlines daily scenes of people and matters with fountain pen in his #Tagman series, demonstrating his skill in swift sketching and drawing. Regardless of the simplicity of his lines, the drawings accurately capture the expressions, sentiment, behaviors and interactions of its subjects. Its style is similar to political cartoons in newspapers, while the topic and narrative resembles the Minjung art context of Korea since the 1980s.

#Tagman shows an opposite approach from Live Protraits. Instead of interacting with the audience before drawing, Park cuts his art works into 9 x 4 cm small cards, tags the cards onto his jumpsuit (the artist mocks that he looks like a yeti), and walks onto the bustling streets. People are welcome to take a label off from him. The images on the labels are drawn from people on the streets, and through further exchange with others, narratives are written in perpetual interchange.

Although painting and drawing remain Jung and Park’s main medium and expression, the interactive works of these two artists are founded upon their observations of the “appearance of beings,” this project therefore seeks to examine the connection between quotidian gaze and narrative.