Water and Stone, Bamboo and Pine. The Art of Sungsil Park - Andrew Buchanan (Director of Fairfields Arts Centre) I was very honoured to be asked to write the introduction in the catalogue for this important exhibition of work by Korean artist Sungsil Park. Honoured and not a little puzzled. Puzzled, because Sungsil Park’s work really needs no introduction at all. Indeed, in these tiresome times when much art work seems to need copious amounts of decoding, interpretation, and explanation, with explanations which are sometimes even more baffling and yet vacuous than the art works themselves, it is just so good to see work which needs no excuses whatsoever and which just speaks for itself. Sungsil paints plants and nature. However, there are a number of factors which really distinguish Sungsil’s work from mere ‘nature painting.’ There’s no picturesque pastoralism, no rural romanticism here. No, what you get in Sungsil’s work is reality. But not just a botanical reality – in her work there is such extraordinary vivid sense of presence – while looking at her work, you really do feel like you are there, her work makes you want to lie down amongst the tall grasses and immerse yourself in this dreaming green world. This intensity in her work arises directly as a result of the intensity of Sungsil’s very deep empathy with her subject matter, her beloved plants. However, to just describe her feelings for nature as ‘animism’ makes them seem like some dusty and dry academic anthropology. Nothing could be further from the truth. For Sungsil the natural world is completely alive and breathing, and what is more, is actually communicating and talking with her in a very real and profound way. Indeed for Sungsil, the Korean poet Yun Seon-do’s(1578 – 1671) famous line “You ask how many friends I have? Water and stone, bamboo and pine” must be very true. Sungsil herself says when speaking English that her painting of plants and trees helps “confirm their beingness, show beingness.” While this is not something we all experience directly ourselves, Sungsil communicates her empathy with nature to us by her paintings. Through her painting we are able to experience just a little of what she feels, she shows us all the things we don’t see when we look (or rather when we are too busy or too preoccupied with all the cares of the day to look properly). She shows us the natural world as it is for her, and perhaps, even as it is for itself. Even the humble and prosaic subject matter of ducks on a pond has a charming truth all of its own. Or the scary exactitude of her drawings of bees and long limbed bugs, poised in deadly stillness – ready to jump at any moment. Sungsil says that painting is her diary, when she feels something she starts to draw. For example, one piece ‘My Friend in Alma’(2006) is the memory of a place where Sungsil lived for 17 years. When she heard that the tree outside was going to be cut down, Sungsil took a dead branch from this tree, burnt it and ground it in with Chinese ink, in order to be able to paint with it. She says she wanted to leave the body of the tree on the painting, so something remained after the tree had gone. Sungsil’s earlier abstract works used the natural soft greys and warm browns colours of mud as the media and the content. Her work then moved on to more monochromatic forms, elegant and sparse – a single tall stem, fragile but determined, standing upright against the wide white sky – using monochromes she says to emphasis the existence of the plants rather than their beauty. Indeed, for a ‘nature painter’, you may be as shocked as I was when I realized just how little green she actually uses in her palette, her soft greys and hazy whites communicate perfectly well instead. However, her newer works now incorporate more splashes of colour, the singing scarlet of fish in a pond, the translucent pearl dawn light on the leaves in ‘Good Morning Beijing’, the flourishes of inky blue black leaves in the sunlight.
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