“Composing Daily Fragments into Poems” is a small curated exhibition, created in collaboration with two Korean artists, each of whom have developed interactive performance/performance from their medium of painting, to expand painting and generate dynamic, two-way exchange and dialogue. Despite the artists’ considerations or views of the subject matter, brushwork, 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 multiple conversations and extend dialogue with viewers through performativity. In addition to exploring the possibilities of performance and expression, this project also intends to illuminate 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, including: a car wash parking lot, a softly lit window sill in a dark night...The style is often realistic, with simple, flat strokes, while acrylic paint is mixed with black, grey and white, in 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, and installations composed of paintings and installation. 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. However, the images from his Tagman series demonstrate the artist’s skill in swift sketching and drawing. Park outlines the daily scenes of people and things with traditional Asian ink and brush. Regardless of the simplicity of his lines, the drawings accurately capture the expressions, sentiment, and daily behaviors and interactions of its subjects, its style and subject matter similar to political cartoons in newspapers, recalling the Minjung art context of Korea since the 1980s. The path of interaction between Tagman and Live portraits diverges, Park cuts his completed paper works into 9 x 4 cm small cards, tags the cards onto a hoodie and pants and dresses himself (the artist laughs self-deprecatingly, and says he looks like a yeti), walking onto the bustling streets so that people can take a label off of him. The images on the labels are drawn from people on the streets, and through this further exchange, even if only by words, can assemble into richer, more interesting stories.