Based out of Seoul, South Korea, and Philadelphia, PA, Jinie Park paints thinly layered, translucent assemblages of linen, Korean muslin, organza, and hand-woven fiber to explore materiality and activated space. Through inverting painted canvasses, exposing underlying structural components, and fusing gridded sections of fabric, Park interrogates the surface as a window or partition that functions as a mechanism for shifting perspectives. Sharing aesthetic considerations with traditional Korean women’s patchwork, called “jo-gaak-bo,” and the formalist experimentations of postminimalism, Park dissects and defamiliarizes the literal fabric of textile work into a language investigating material structure as a constant state of discovery. The heightened procedural and referential nature of Park’s paintings acknowledges a binary framework between traditional Korean textile practices and a Western sense of modernist abstraction. Park complicates and refutes this dichotomy, focusing on the physicality of liminal states, recalibrating the painting as an explorable, spatial object full of permeable boundaries.
Jinie Park’s paintings have been widely exhibited and collected throughout the US and internationally, in venues that include: Elizabeth Leach Gallery (Portland, OR); Kimsechoong Museum (Seoul, South Korea); Scott Center (Westminster, MD); Jeju Biennale, (Jeju Island, South Korea);Lazy Susan Gallery (New York, NY);Steven Harvey Fine Art Project (New York, NY) Park received a BFA in painting at Seoul National University (Seoul, South Korea) and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD). Park was awarded an Individual Artist Award in Painting from the Maryland State Art Council, the Henry Walters Traveling Fellowship. In 2016 Park received the Perez Art Museum Miami Picks Award during PULSE Miami Beach.
“I view my work as a window, doorway or a mirror. Painting to me functions as a partition in a room as it visually opens and closes the space, granting and restricting light. The openings in the painting reveal its physical limitation by exposing its stretchers like the skeleton of a body. Simultaneously it allows illusion along with the shadows and the painted surface. The paintings deliver the liminality, which accompanies grids. The grids in the painting casts ambivalent aspects of space implying hidden/exposed, touchable/untouchable, openness/closeness. My painting often absorbs and duplicates the space where it is located exposing the wall color and casting the shadows in the painting simultaneously. It suggests a foreign landscape as if a window in a room completely changes the perspectival space.” -Jinie Park
