Making art has always been a psychological necessity for me. It allows me to work out internal tensions and emotions. My work express tensions and emotions, connected with my past, which have accumulated in my subconscious and conscious mind. The progress of my work, as it relates to the past, flows from sudden recall of particular visual experiences, which I attempt to reconstruct.
I began by using my hair to make a self-portrait. To me, hair became an intensely physical thing, but one that outlasts the rest of the physical body. At the same time, it evokes the spiritual qualities of a human being, thereby transcending physical existence. I use hair as a symbolic body, and as a marker of spiritual life. Therefore, my use of hair became abstracted, detached from my selfportrait and began to function as a personal symbol.
Much of my work with hair is meant to bring my art back into the realm of the natural. I begin with my emotions, then I reconstruct forms as they suggest themselves. I create surfaces that have varied textures indicating undefined space and undulation. Through the visual shifting of form, I want to imbue the surfaces with a spiritual life of their own. Therefore, these forms go through the same growing process as things in nature.
Expanding upon these ideas and experimenting with formal values of hair, I want the viewer to participate in the process of discovery. Art, for me, functions as an essential instrument in the development of self-consciousness, creating alternative forms. To convey my own self-identity, I developed a language of forms which represent who I am.
Sincerely yours,
Park, HunJu
