[비즈한국] Artist Park Yong-il, well-known for his ‘bundle’ paintings, will open his solo exhibition ‘He-story: Nothing Happened Today’ at Gallery H in Insa-dong, Seoul, on Wednesday the 16th. He will showcase a variety of works, including paintings, wire drawings, and three-dimensional installations, centered on his core formative language: the ‘bundle’ (bottari).
For artist Park Yong-il, a ‘bundle’ is a metaphor that holds people’s stories and precious memories. His background is rooted in real-life experience. The artist lived in Goyang, Gyeonggi-do, for over 20 years. He personally experienced the turbulent period of the late 1990s, during which the rural landscape collapsed due to the development of new towns in Goyang, and he captured this in his paintings. Initially, he used ‘paper boats’ to represent a drifting life, and from 2014, he developed the ‘bundle’ as his primary formative language.
Park Yong-il’s bundles go beyond simply reproducing objects; they are ‘condensations of life’ and ‘overlapping layers of information.’ He layers fragments of memory—such as clippings from newspaper articles, a musician’s face, or the musical scores of famous songs—onto the canvas, then binds them together with brushstrokes, drawings, thread, or wire.
This exhibition is also interesting in its spatial arrangement. Utilizing all four floors of the gallery, the basement displays only two pieces—a 300-size large-scale monochrome bundle painting and a bundle sculpture made of metal scouring pads—creating an atmosphere of extreme stillness and meditation. Ascending to the first floor, the monochrome works and large-scale pieces face each other, creating visual tension. In particular, the wire drawings set against a black wall create a dramatic moment. On the second and third floors, the atmosphere shifts with vibrant, colorful bundle paintings. The bundles, which embrace painful stories, finally give the feeling of being sublimated.
Among the new works presented this time is a piece commemorating David Hockney, who recently passed away. The work contains the sentence, “REMEMBER YOU CAN NOT LOOK AT THE SUN OR DEATH FOR VERY LONG,” which is taken from a work by David Hockney. In a gesture of mourning for Hockney, he borrowed the image from his work and re-stitched the sentence into it. It is a re-binding of memory and mourning for an artist within Park Yong-il’s own ‘bundle.’
Art critic Kim Yun-seop explains, “Park Yong-il’s bundles are ‘a vessel of endless compassion and empathy toward the lives of others.’ By wrapping the joys and sorrows of ordinary contemporaries neatly within a wrapping cloth, the artist conveys a message of solidarity that ‘our ordinary today is by no means trivial.’”
The exhibition title, ‘Nothing Happened Today,’ also contains a paradoxical message: an ordinary day in which nothing happens is a precious peace obtained after enduring countless stories and the weight of life.
Artist Park Yong-il expressed his condolences to the victims of a recent disaster, saying, “The title contains a dual meaning: the hope that no bad things happen for even a single day because so many terrible things are happening in the world, and the reality that even if something terrible happens to an individual, the world keeps rolling as if nothing happened—yet, another huge tragedy has occurred in Nepal.”
The exhibition runs until Sunday, October 11, and can be viewed from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The gallery is closed every Tuesday and during the Chuseok holiday period from September 24 to 27.