Story of Tools by Ju HyunPark
wait 2 _ hatchet _ 25*20*40cm _ 2008
Tools have been Park¡¯s material for talking about people who live in a civilized society. Strictly speaking, he uses them as media handles of tools making tools. He gives heads and handles new meaning as tools and places for story basis and story embodiments out of their original functions
piano _ hammer _ 15*15*30cm _ 2009
love _ battledore _ 15*15*40c _ 2009
To Ju Hyun Park as a sculptor, tools are not materials but also subjects. He engraves the world accomplished by Homo Faber and desiring human beings on the handles of tools in tiny shapes. By this, his ¡°Story of tools¡± sometimes symbolically and sometimes realistically describes the contradictory desires of coeval!s who have conflictions between the settlement and the nomadism and the freedom and the restriction according to the discord between the sense and the sensibility. He does not keep the distance constantly from various narratives which is his own story, is what he observed, is told by other and is his own story told by the third person. Also, each episode is arranged horizontally without the time order or the logical order and composes the artist¡¯s world with its space and time (in the reality, in the symbol and in the imagination) crossing each other.
The midst of rain _ hammer _ 15*15*25cm _ 2009
blacksmith _ hammer _ 15*15*30cm _ 2009
The episodes on the tools play the theatrical situations independent from the artist¡¯s intention. They bring us to meet the artist¡¯s lyric mentality. The old tools and handles, and the structure of the story told on those give the experiences of the free wills and challenges of human beings in the world and the Sisyphus¡¯ punishment. He watches the story he is engraving by carving his ¡°Story of Tools¡± on the tools. This confuses who tells the story, the sculptor or the sculpture. Also, including his action of creating, it is met that Self-reproduction or Self repetition implied in all behaviors of the instrumental civilization created by Homo Faber. This gives the melancholy and the coeval! sympathy about human beings alienated from his own instrumental civilization
solitude _ DaDim is a bat _ 15*15*35cm _ 2009
chair _ hammer _ 35*35*60cm _ 2009
Ju Hyun Park derives unique humors from the antagonistic relationship between tools and human beings rather than criticizes human¡¯s contradictory desires and limitations. With humors, jokes and ironies, his ¡°Story of Tools¡± asks what creative human is to us who has fallen into just tools alienated from their own instrumental civilization. Also it gives a question about what is social meaning and role of artist¡¯s activities as tools. He seems to resolve the question at a point where he listens to his story again by holding tools to play his role, and another embodiment of the story connects the basis of the story with the embodiment of the story. In this <Story of Tools> exhibition, it is conspicuous as a deliberation of the artist that the metaphorical symbol about the role of the spaces where instrumental society and Homo Faber gets through their uncomfortable relationship in terms of the chair shaped artwork and the bird shaped artwork made of tools.
SONGE (Art Studies, Art Criticism), translated by Yeonjung Kim
Story of Tools by Ju HyunPark
July 31st ~ August 9th 2009
The conversation with the Artist
4 pm August 2th
KEPCO PLAZA GALLERY
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The conversation video script
KEPCO PLAZA GALLERY_Kepco Arts Center, 1355 Seocho dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul Korea Tel. 82-2-2055-1192 www.kepco.co.kr/plaza/
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