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Park Life

One of the more tedious public debates relating to modern art often involves discussion as to whether such as mixed media installations and a myriad forms of performance art constitute ‘art’ at all.

What all this agonising seems to ignore is the fact that writers, artists, performers are, by instinct, no respecters of rules, of limitation, of boundaries.

And that’s how it should be.

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Bona Park who was born in Seoul, Korea in 1977, studied Art Practice at Goldsmiths as well as Fine Art and Mass Communications both in Korea and Pittsburg USA.

She now works in Seoul and London. And clearly is a natural adventurer into many areas.

As she says, ‘My work pursues performativity through various mediums’.

You won’t find ‘performativity’ in the Oxford English Dictionary but, it seems to us, its an excellent combination of ‘performance’ and ‘activity’, be that with reference to the artist or the subject matter.

The process of Park’s muse wanders far and wide.

Cooking has often been likened to an art form and her inquisitive camera in one video work we’re featuring follows a Mexican woman wrestling with a full English breakfast, a Korean more at home with instant noodles and an Indonesian confronting a Gammon Steak.

Further examples of her innovation include a work commissioned for an exhibition entitled ‘Visual vocabulary: between Image and Word’ in which Park’s piece references the sign outside the Willesden Green, London exhibition space (‘Do not feed the pigeons’, originally in English and Urdu) but, as a result of a translation into Arabic included within the shape of a Muslim flag, the wording then throws up different interpretations!

Finally consider ‘Sea of Love’ a 2007 photo installation. Park invited six men she dated through the Guardian’s ‘Soul Mate’ column to each record, with a disposable camera, elements from their meeting which always involved a ‘date course’ running along the Thames from the London Eye to Tate Modern.

The chances of predicting where Park will go next are remote – we’re pleased to say.

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