Sobin Park - Woman and Dragon in Love

Last night (27 November), before proceeding to our English conversation session, Sobin and I had dinner at a vegetarian buffet resto, one of her fave places to keep herself healthy. She was introduced to me by my beautiful "Korean agent" Eunyoung.

Then we learned that it was a year ago when she made her first exhibition in NY. Below are some of the reviews of her works.

So for that historic occasion I asked her to sign for me a postcard of her art exhibit last year. The photo link as of writing still unavailable... (still waiting for twitxr to post it - or my mobile phone company is lazy enough to send it again... ughhh,,,).

Sobin is hoping to go back to NY for a year of art residency. I wish her all the luck. Indeed her art works need to be noticed by the art community and seen by a global audience.

Watch the lady-dragon! her lady and dragon painting conquers the world...


Here is a video-animation of her works found from her website:

(Click image to view)

Sobin Park: Beauty & The Beast
November 27 ~ December 23
Opening Reception: November 30 (Fri.) 6~8pm
Link - http://twurl.cc/8ac

Although Sobin Park has exhibited widely and globally, this show marks the first solo exhibition in the United States. Park’s imagery offsets the beautiful against the beastly into a symphony or perhaps a dissonance upon the two extremes. She juxtaposes the scaly darkness of a dragon against the delicate translucent skin of the female beauty embraced by his roughness. The resulting differences in color, texture, content, density, sparseness and the nuanced shades in-between them makes for a very sensuous yet complex oeuvre. Park plays with and engages in a dialogue about beauty and its beholder, or beauty and its perceived opposite; ugliness. Nevertheless, cultural notions of beauty may be relevant in the case of Park who earned her BA and MFA from South Korean universities and has been working there all her life although exhibiting globally. Beauty is after all in the eyes of the beholder and may have been a matter of taste for Kant but in Hegel’s theories of aesthetics taste is not an issue. Perhaps in enumerating the criteria of standard discussions on beauty we need take note that our cultural notion of beauty is a cluster concept including the elements of order and flawlessness.

Sobin Park at the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York
REVIEWED
by D. Dominick Lombardi
Link - http://twurl.cc/8ab

Earlier I mentioned Freud, and I even see references to Freudian era artists in Park’s art. In Essence III, 2007, the woman’s right hand is straight out of an Egon Schiele work, while her left hand, which cradles a crescent moon, is Gustav Klimt-like in its symbolism. Even some of the poses in the various drawings, especially in their freeness of form, are Schiele and Klimt-like. Love and sex are psychological warfare. Like love and sex, these images are executed with a deep, dark, overpowering, and omnipotent pleasure.

You could even place Park’s work in the company of some pretty wild pre-Surrealists. Park’s power as an artist is not unlike the effect that Arnold Bocklin’s The Maiden, Merman, and Sea Monster, Carlos Schwabe’s Depression an Ideal, 1907, Mikhail Vrubel’s The Demon 1902, or Jean Delville’s The Treasure of Satan, 1895. It’s a visceral thing, churning up emotion and thought right from the gut.

By Changing My Body I Eagerly Wish to Become a Big Yong,
A Fantastic World Based on a Tale
Yoon Jin-sup(Art critic/Prof. of Honam University)
Link - http://blog.daum.net/0166402861/7222335

Her works show marked improvement with Seonmyo becoming more abstract. She seems to put her heart in the creation of natural atmosphere rather than mere description of scenes. Concrete forms were illustrated through countless repetition and overlap of pencil drawings. And such forms seem to be buried under this natural atmosphere. It is dangerous when there's a loss of balance because the artist's consciousness is sucked into the work, but she seems to do her best in maintaining a proper distance with her artistic out put with that of the tale's unfolding.

Park Sobin's presents her own touching tale of love between the Yong and the woman. With the light coloring added on her drawings she create dramatic scenes. And with her adroit technique and use of pencil, a fire-like saturation on both the whole and part of her drawings are created. Now her large-size works on canvas are all set for the gaze of its spectators.