Heo (虛): Seungmo Park
BLANK SPACE is pleased to announce “Heo 虛,” an exhibition of sculptural work by Seungmo Park opening March 1, 2016 and on view through April 16, 2016. It is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. Demonstrating Park’s pioneering achievements in stainless steel, the exhibition presents his new work, which underscores his longstanding interest of representing the reality and visual perception by creating a convincing illusion of his subjects.
Park’s Heo 虛 series, meaning ‘hollowness’ in Chinese, demonstrates a poetic expansion of the artist’s persistent philosophical inquiries on man, verisimilitude of his figures, and his effort to strip them to the bare essentials. In Park’s earlier works, the artist has worked with life-cast and models drawing upon the tradition of classical and archaic sculptures with highly realistic renderings of body and form. Advancing this practice, Park succeeds in creating an entirely different representation of human figures as a disparate space where we simply inhabit. His inflated and twisted figures devoid of life are surprisingly real, witty and complex.
Park’s Maya series is in line with the artist’s idea of constructing a space or scene that transcends its existence. His photorealistic work, seemingly computer-generated, are painstakingly hand-crafted by cutting layers of wire mesh. Prompting viewers interact with works of art and their immediate surroundings, the artist enacts a way of seeing beyond what is real and visible.
Born in South Korea, Seungmo Park received his BFA at Dong-A University in Pusan, Korea in 1998. Park’s work have been collected and exhibted by numerous institutions world-wide including his solo exhibition at The Dennos Museum Center (2014, Traverse City, MI), Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, (2015. Kalamazoo, MI) Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum (2014, University Center, MI) and group exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery (2009, London, England), the Museum of Arts and Design (2011, New York, NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2014, Taipei, Taiwan), Gwangju Museum of Art, (2012, Gwangju, Korea) the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (2012, Ansan, Korea), Fairmont Bar Al Bahr (2012, Abu Dhabi, UAE), Pohang Art Center (2011, Pohang, Korea), Hangaram Art Museum, (Seoul, Korea), Insa Art Center (2010, Seoul, Korea), Ansan Arts Center (2009, Ansan, Korea) and Albemarle Gallery (2008, London, England).
