Unknown Familiar Story of Us: Personal Mythologies

Unknown Familiar Story of Us: personal mythologies

Yiwon Park

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts

College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales

2013

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to my supervisor Peter Sharp for his encouragement and insightful supervision during my MFA research. Thanks to my initial supervisor Mike Esson for supporting my research in the beginning. Thanks to Andrew Christofiedes for his advise on my work and support. Thanks to Sylvia Ross, Bruce Latimer and Kathy Yeh for supporting my art. Thanks to All my friends Peter Wildman, Bettina Bruder, Wenmin Li, Bernardo Bento, Virginia Mewer, Mike Barnard, Dominique Hindmash, Paul Williams and Chelsea Lehmann who share their knowledge and intuition in both joyful and tough moments of our lives.

I do appreciate all the support from COFA, School of Art. Thanks to Jo Elliot, Leong Chan for administration assistance. Thanks to James Ward, Alex Bryne and Francois Breuaellaud-Limondi from Tool Room for the amazing assistance.

Abstract

This research investigates the means of drawing personal narratives through visual symbols. In this, I position myself as both subject matter and medium to engage with various realms of reality. The resulting autobiographical narratives deal with feelings of insecurity in my place of existence. Based on this insecurity, I develop the concept of the ‘unknown familiar’ as a methodology to explore individual sensitivities within a collective unconscious. The ‘unknown familiar’ draws on Freud's uncanny and Jung’s theory of archetypes to describe that unfamiliar and ambiguous feeling that occurs in the gap between personal metaphors and archetypal symbols. Supporting the development of this framework in my own practice, I examine the production of personal narratives through symbols and metaphors by prominent artists such as Beuys, Bourgeois, Bosch and Smith. These are studied from psychological, cultural and mythological perspectives.

Creating images is used as an active and organic process of investigating my own thoughts and emotions. In my practice I search for images that underlie my conscious and subconscious, and operate through dreams, memories and everyday life. Through these, my inter-disciplinary studio practice visualises the intangible sense of my own presence. My psychological motivation is to overcome the insecurity of uncertainty, and based on this I explore otherness and the absurd through personal symbolism.

Contents

Abstract 3 Contents 4 List of Illustrations 5 Introduction 9 Chapter 1: Feeling Insecure 15 1.1. Where Do We Live? 15 1.2. Unknown Familiar 17 Between the Uncanny and the Archetype 17 1.3. Methodology 23 The Cognition of Feelings Through Image Association 24 Metaphoric Tales and Symbols 26 Chapter 2: Narrative 33 2.1. A Psychological Perspective 34 Emotion as Raw Material 34 Body, Memory and Emotion 34 2.2. A Cultural perspective 43 The Image of Hell in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delight and the Korean Buddhist Painting Jiokdo 43 Images Collected Through Cultural Consumption 47 2.3. A Mythological Perspective 52 Mythology 52 Disguise 56 Chapter 3: Responses to the feeling of insecurity 62 3.1. Beuys’ and Namjun Paik’s response: The Artist as Shaman 63 Reconciling Fear and connecting with different realms of reality 63 3.2. My response 68 Telling Stories Through Drawing, Painting and Sculpture 68 The Altar: Installation 69 Perform though Personal Space 71 Chapter 4: Conclusion 77 Bibliography 79

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Diagram outlining research themes. Author’s diagram

Figure 2: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2012. Acrylic on paper, 25 x 35cm.

Figure 3: Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, c.1944. Oil paint on 3 boards, 940 x 737 mm.

Figure 4: Hieronymus Bosch, detail of Hell from The Garden of Earthly Delight, c.16th century. Oil on wood panel.

Figure 5: Still from The Birds. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures, 1963.

Figure 6: Yiwon Park, My Own Pacific Ocean, 2012. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 21cm.

Figure 7: Yiwon Park, My Own Pacific Ocean, 2012. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 21 cm.

Figure 8: Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1950. Ink on paper, 50.8 x 33cm. .

Figure 9: Louise Bourgeois, Ode a Ma Mere (plate 6), 1995. Drypoint, 30.4 x 30.4 cm, suite of 9 prints.

Figure 10: Miss X’s drawing, from J. Chodorow. Jung on Active Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 99.

Figure 11: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, 120 x 90cm.

Figure 12: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, 120 x 90cm.

Figure 13: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, 120 x 90cm.

Figure 14: Symbols in Korean folk art from Yeol-Su Yoon and Roderick Whitfield, Folk painting (London: Laurence King, 2003), 359.

Figure 15: Yiwon Park, Personal Symbols, 2009. Pencil on paper, 28 x 23cm each

Figure 16: Australian Aboriginal symbols,

Figure 17: Yiwon Park, Life is a Boiled Egg, 2012. Mixed media on canvas.

Figure 18: Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1946-1947. Oil and ink on linen, 91.4 x 35.6 cm. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth, Photo: Rafael Lobato.

Figure 19: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar Story, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 21 cm.

Figure 20: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2012. Mixed media on paper, 21 x 30cm.

Figure 21: Louise Bourgeois, Cell (Choisy), 1990–1993. Mixed media, size variable. Collection Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto, Photo: Marcus Leith

Figure 22: Yiwon Park, Untitled, 2012. Mixed media on cotton, 100 x 100cm.

Figure 23: Yiwon Park, You Were Not There, 2012. Mixed media on cotton, 120 x 90cm.

Figure 24: Yiwon Park, I Was There, 2012. Mixed media on cotton, 120 x 90cm.

Figure 25: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c.1503–1504. Oil on wood panels, 220 x 389 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Figure 26: Jiokdo (detail – hell), 파주 보광사 명부전 지옥도 .

Figure 27: Katy Perry, Firework album cover, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firework_(song)

Figure 28: Yiwon Park, Do You Ever Feel Like A Plastic Bag?, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 30 x20cm.

Figure 29: Yiwon Park, Do You Ever Feel Like A Plastic Bag?, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 20cm.

Figure 30: An image of a plastic bag chosen from a random Internet search, from http://qldconservation.org.au/plastic-bag-free-queensland/

Figure 31: Movie poster for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial from

Figure 32: Yiwon Park, I must phone home?, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30cm.

Figure 33: Yiwon Park, Egg Moon With Rabbit Ear, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30cm.

Figure 34: Hieronymus Bosch, detail from The Garden of Earthly Delight,

Figure 35: Yiwon Park, Red Riding Blanket, 2013. Acrylic on paper, 25 x 35.

Figure 36: Jesus Christ,

Figure 37: Seated Buddha, Unified Silla dynasty, 8th century. Granite, h.326 cm. Sokkuram Cave- Temple, Gyongju, South Gyongsang Province National Treasure no. 24

Figure 38: Movie poster, Superman Returns,

Figure 39: Wandjina from Frederick O’Connor, Ursula O’Connor and Sue O’Connor, "Wandjina, graffiti and heritage," in Compelling Cultures: Representing Cultural Diversity and Cohesion in Multicultural Australia

Figure 40: Yiwon Park, How To Play A Rabbit, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 20cm each.

Figure 41: Yiwon Park, How could I cross my pacific ocean, resin sculpture and Manly sand, installation size 150 x 60 x 30cm.

Figure 42: Kiki Smith, Mine, 1999. Glass, 38 units vary from 95 x 11 x 12 cm to 18 x 18 x 10 cm. Photo by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy of Pace Wildenstein, New York.

Figure 43: Yiwon Park, Self-portraits, 2010. Ceramic, height 18 cm.

Figure 44: Kiki Smith, Sirens, 2007. Set of six cast bronze sculptures with black patina, size variable. Matt Suib and Ellen Page Wilson.

Figure 45: Yiwon Park, When The Night Falls Into Me, 2013. Mixed media on paper, 25 x 35cm.

Figure 46: Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, 1965. Mervyn Horton Bequest Fund 1997

Figure 47: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Porcelain, 36 x 48 x 61cm.

Figure 48: Joseph Beuys, The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated, 1964. Paper, oil, colour, ink, felt, chocolate and photography, 157 x 178 x 2 cm. Museum Schloss Moyland, Sammlung van der Grinten, Photo © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2008.

Figure 49: NamJun Paik, Cherish Performance for Joseph Beuys, 1990.

Figure 50: Yiwon Park, Personal Altar, 2013. Mixed media installation, size variable.

Figure 51: Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974. Week-long action with coyote at Rene Block Gallery, New York, Courtesy Ronald Feldman Arts, New York. © and photograph by Caroline Tisdall.

Figure 52: Yiwon Park, Untold Artist Statement – The Letter That I Couldn’t Send, 2011. Mixed media performance.

Figure 53: Yiwon Park, 1.30 min Exchange / Put Yourself In My Shoes, 2012. Single channel video, 1.30 min.

Introduction

Figure 1: Diagram outlining research themes. Author’s diagram

Personal narrative is explored today more than ever. In various forms of social media the fragments of personal narrative flow fast. But personal narrative also has a longer tradition in psychoanalysis, as Dr. Lea Gaydos explains, it can be a method for understanding patients. She describes how ‘personal narrative is a form of autobiographical storytelling that gives shape to life experience’, reflecting sensitive invisible feelings and cultural influences through story.1 Moreover, personal narrative displays relationships between the collective subconscious and individual sensitivities, which are seen through tensions between archetypal symbols and personal metaphors.

In this thesis I ask what personal narrative brings to contemporary art. Why are personal symbols meaningful, and what do we as artists achieve with them?

In my own work I explore personal narrative to reflect on feelings of insecurity. The process of making this work is a method to understand how I feel about the world I interact with. My feelings contain my concept of reality, which is revealed as I become the medium, visualising feelings through narrative.

The feeling of insecurity is closely tied to fear. Caterina Albano discusses the ‘culture of fear’ and the resulting ‘aesthetic of fear’:

‘Modernity’ also brought about the conceptualisation of anxiety as a state of prolonged susceptibility to fear, worry, uneasiness, preoccupation and dread that are not related to any specific external danger but connected to an internal angst that concerns the self and its being in the world2

1 H. Lea Gaydos, "Understanding Personal Narratives: An Approach to Practice," Journal of Advanced 2 Caterina Albano, Fear and Art in The Contemporary World (London: Reaktion, 2012), 14.

The ‘aesthetic of fear’ is a phenomenal response to zeitgeist in contemporary art.3 I strongly agree with Albano on this; fear derives from feelings of insecurity in human nature, which are especially pronounced in the post-postmodern 4 era, where we encounter the overwhelming experience that everything is art and is explored everywhere. Moreover, the realms of reality, which interlace through physical, mental and virtual space, are becoming increasingly complex. Boundaries between those realms are blurred by various media, including the enormous amounts of information produced and reproduced in social media. Living in this fast-moving cultural phenomenon creates anxiety.

For myself, feelings of insecurity are further compounded by my identity as an

Australian immigrant from South Korea. I began this research by looking at the insecurity resulting from my displacement between binary cultures: Korean and

Australian, Asian and Western, collective and individual. Feeling that I do not strongly belong anywhere made me continue to seek out the places I exist.

But my work is not specifically focused on cultural dislocation, rather it is about the influences of emotion on my work. As I said earlier, I consider feeling to be the closest and most vivid sensory experience in cognising reality. Feelings of insecurity are formed when confusion arises from different realms of reality, for instance, when I have a vivid dream it affects my day more than experiences of the material world. The eerie confusion is even greater in the case of a nightmare. Because of this foreign feeling I

3 Ibid., 7–18. 4 Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-time Capitalism ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 9–12.

sometimes spend my day trying to figure out what the dream was telling me. I later feel less strange about a dream when I can understand its symbolism. Broadly, this is the aesthetic emotion that I call the ‘unknown familiar’ in my practice.

My research focuses on developing this concept of the ‘unknown familiar’, through reference to German psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's notion of the uncanny5 and Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypes.6 ‘Unknown familiar’ describes the feeling of insecurity that underlies both my personal thinking and an archetypal subconscious.

This insecurity is not only linked to the physical places in which I exist, but also relationships between past, present, and fantasy lives.

Albano has also addressed the emergence of the uncanny within the related current phenomenon of fear:

The uncanny similarly emerges as a fitting aesthetic category but also a real experience in which old, familiar fear appears in new, unfamiliar guises, whereby displacement becomes a form and condition that would epitomise post modernity.7

The unknown but somewhat familiar feeling that results from the ‘uncertainty of dwelling’ appears in my work through metaphors and symbols. Considering this feeling as a state of reality I explore my personal narrative, using myself as subject matter. For me narrating, or telling a story, is the visceral reaction to the unknown anxiety of trying to understand the complex realms of reality. Hence, my research focuses on

5 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin, 2003). 6 Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 7 Albano, Fear and Art in The Contemporary World, 14.

overviewing the characteristics of personal narratives and symbolism from various perspectives.

In the first chapter, I explain from where my feelings of insecurity arise and how I represent them symbolically. I discuss the unknown familiar through Freud’s uncanny and Jung’s archetypes, describing the process of visualising the ‘feeling of insecurity’ as an unknown familiar emotion through symbols and image associations. Image association is one way that I generate my feelings. Symbolism and metaphor are key to my building of visual narrative.

In the second chapter, I overview three different perspectives on personal narrative: psychological, cultural and mythological. I examine these through the works of other artists. I look at Louise Bourgeois’ autobiographical narrative of pain and fear, focusing on how her metaphoric tales use personal symbols to bring forth uncanny feelings that relate to my own work. I analyse Hieronymus Bosch’s 16th century painting The

Garden of Earthly Delight, which deals with the cultural influence over an artist’s visual interpretation, representing the religious beliefs of Bosch’s time and a culture driven by a fear of mortality. I also compare one of Bosch’s panels with the Korean Buddhist painting Jiokdo.8 Visual iconography can be a barometer to read the collective culture of an era, and although my work engages with personal symbols it certainly bears the influence of cultural context. Lastly I consider Jung’s questioning of ‘the myths we live in’ to review how artists engage myths through artistic narrative, which is witnessed in

8 Laurel Kendall, "Death and Taxes: A Korean Approach to Hell," Transactions: Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch 60 (1985): 1–13.

the work of Joseph Beuys and Kiki Smith. Observing their engagement with animal symbols, I see my symbols as personal totems in uncovering my own myths.

In the third chapter, responding to feelings of insecurity I continue my discussion on

Beuys’ symbolism. I agree with his insightful statement that the artist is a ‘modern shaman’ who becomes a medium to channel the spirituality of art. Motivated by personal experiences of traumatic fear Beuys not only expressed fear and pain but asserted art as a medium of healing through archetypal symbolic forms. In my work spirituality implies emotional strength in responding to the insecurity of uncertainty. I look into shamanic spiritual practice developed by Korean artist Nam June Paik, who performed as a traditional Korean shaman with symbolic objects. It is a moment of the uncanny when Paik presents unfamiliar combinations of symbols, like Korean shamanistic elements of soil, fire and water, along with Beuys’ piano. By performing and telling the story, Paik created a myth of Beuys. Researching feelings of insecurity has led me to not only express such feelings, but pushed my practice to respond to them.

Chapter 1: Feeling Insecure

1.1. Where Do We Live?

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.9

My art practice is an ongoing experiment in creating a visual language by interacting with the flux of influences from different realms. For myself, our place of existence is vulnerable and uncertain, and this influences the stories I tell. I currently live in

Australia, but I have spent more than two-thirds of my life in Korea. Most of my habits derive from my Korean heritage. I also live in a virtual online space. Living in the present, I sometimes also live in the past, and sometimes in my dreams. There is interplay between past, present and dream. The collision of these past and present, traditional and contemporary, real and virtual realities provide the background to my project, through which I aim to visualise my insecurities about place and existence and the inherent anxiety of uncertainty.

The famous anecdote of Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream evokes the confusion of our presence in the material world. It resonates as a question: what is the real world? And where does our presence exist?

Last night Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, spirits soaring he was a butterfly (is it that in showing what he was he suited his own fancy?), and did not know about Zhou. When all of a sudden he awoke, he was Zhou with all his wits about him. He does not know whether he is Zhou who dreams he is a butterfly or

9 Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1945), 12.

a butterfly who dreams he is Zhou. Between Zhou and the butterfly there was necessarily a dividing; just this is what is meant by the transformation of things.10

People have always faced such ontological questions. I am sure that we today would consider Zhuang Zhou’s 4th century life in the era of Taoism as rather simple compared our own. When I now think about my own world I have to consider the complicated interlacing of the material/physical world, virtual space and mental space.

The technical nature of storytelling has changed since the introduction of moving images, especially with developments in digital and social networking technologies.

Today the fast developments of social media offer a great system to broadcast one’s personal stories. There are stories of mine, yours, ours, and those of others. Once we engage with this space, we start to prove our existence through personal information.

Our likes and dislikes reflect our political and sexual tendencies. Some people are more active in online space than in their real life. So questions have to be raised: ‘Where do I live? Where do you live? Where do I really exist? Feelings of insecurity are caused by not really knowing where I belong, which creates uncertainty in the places I exist. This feeling can be described through Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny.

10 Angus Charles Graham (ed.), Chuang-Tzŭ: The Inner Chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 61.

1.2. Unknown Familiar

Between the Uncanny and the Archetype

Figure 2: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2012. Acrylic on paper, 25 x 35cm.

In my work, the unknown familiar refers to that unfamiliar feeling of being caught between a personal metaphor and its social archetype, or between a personal metaphor and a viewer’s personal metaphor. It is the tension between individual sensitivity and the collective unconscious (fig. 2).

Freud’s uncanny is rooted in the German word unheimlich, or un-homely, though it doesn’t exactly mean the opposite of homely. For Freud the uncanny is a ‘kind of province’ that ‘investigates the subject of aesthetics even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of feeling’.11 The uncanny is paradoxical in nature, it occurs when we face something unknown yet

11 Freud, The Uncanny, 219.

vaguely familiar at the same time, which provokes a sense of fear. To illustrate, Freud uses hotels and travel. Hotel rooms are at once like a home and hence very familiar, yet you don’t know where anything is and it is really nothing like your home at all, which creates a sense of uneasiness.12 The hotel analogy demonstrates the aesthetic experience of my work well. This feeling of uncanny appeared when I left my home in Korea, where I live with my family; I moved to Australia right after my mother passed away.

The sudden disconnection from family and home provoked anxiety and insecurity, and I have sought out home ever since without finding it.

Freud associated the uncanny with buried childhood trauma or something hidden that doesn’t have a familiar relationship with our conscious selves.13 We feel uneasy, even fearful when this feeling stirs in our unconsciousness. The uncanny resembles the aesthetic emotion that Warren Shibbles defined as ‘a cognition-causing feeling’.14 It is the aesthetic feeling we face in the horror of existence in Francis Bacon’s paintings (fig.

3), the absurd hybrid creatures of Hieronymus Bosch (fig. 4), or the thrill of Hitchcock’s

The Birds (fig. 5). The works are confronting because they are unfamiliar, yet they are based on recognisable human experience. This kind of experience provokes a feeling of human nature’s unfamiliarity; it is the nature we bury because it is uncomfortable and confronting. This feeling of frustration occurs when we face unexpected events beyond our ordinary understanding of the structure of the material realm. However, when this unfamiliar experience evokes understanding through our cognitive realms it moves into familiar territory. This occurs when uncertain or unfamiliar events evoke archetypal

12 Nicholas Royle, "Hotel Psychoanalysis: Some Remarks on Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud," Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9:1 (2004): 3–14. 13 Freud, The Uncanny, 227–228. 14 Warren A. Shibles, “Emotion in Aesthetics,” Dordrecht: Springer 64 (1995): 34.

emotions, of which we are most of the time unaware. Jentsch speaks to this experience in a similar way to my point about the sensations provoked by images from Bosch and

Bacon:

In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton, and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.15

Within my work, the uncanny develops from psychological insecurities caused by physical, cultural and emotional disorientation. I believe that this technique can extend beyond the human/automaton comparison offered by Jentsch to include other archetypal images.

Figure 3: Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, c.1944. Oil paint on

3 boards, 940 x 737 mm.

15 Jentsch, Ernst Anton in Freud, Sigmund. “The uncanny.” The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (1919:219-52)

Figure 4 (left): Hieronymus Bosch, detail of Hell from The Garden of Earthly Delight, c.1503–1504. Oil on wood panel.

Figure 5 (right): Still from The Birds. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures, 1963.

The other significant element of my term unknown familiar is the archetype, developed by Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung. In considering the uncanny an aesthetic experience, we must assume there to be an archetype within the unconscious, which serves as the basis of these feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity, and old and new memories. Thus, within my work I employ symbols that relate to archetypal meaning to provoke the aesthetic response of unknown familiar.

Jung proposed our mental faculty to be powered by the interaction between conscious and subconscious, but there are also other realms beyond our conscious understanding that he called ‘the collective unconscious.’16 This collective unconscious is represented through archetypal images. My observation on this archetypal relationship is presented

16 Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 44.

within my own work (figs. 6–7), which can be read against Louise Bourgeois’ drawings

(figs. 8–9) and a painting by Jung’s patient, Miss X (fig. 10). Collectively these show the insecure feeling, uneasiness, and psychological disorientation through similar pictorial representation.

Figures 6–7: Yiwon Park, My Own Pacific Ocean, 2012. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 21 cm each.

Figure 8: Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1950. Ink on paper, 50.8 x 33cm.

Figure 9: Louise Bourgeois, Ode a Ma Mere (plate 6), 1995. Drypoint, 30.4 x 30.4 cm, suite of 9 prints.

Figure 10: Miss X’s drawing.

Miss X was an anonymous lady struggling with family issues who consulted Jung regarding her depression. She felt she had ‘got stuck’. During therapy she made a number of paintings, which Jung claimed showed alchemical symbols. In this particular painting (fig. 10) she depicted an ocean through peaking shapes. In the ocean there is a woman (herself) along with unspecified egg shapes. To Jung, the picture displayed her

‘imprisoned state’ of being caught up in the unconscious – the ocean symbolising repressed feelings of being ‘caught and helpless’.17

In an interesting similarity between my work and Miss X’s painting is common symbolism: both feature egg shapes and a woman’s figure. However the greatest archetypal relationship between Bourgeois’ drawings, Miss X’s painting and my work is the use of water as a recurring symbol of unknown space. There are similar repetitive peak-like shapes characterising water in all three works. Water has been a significant symbol in my work for the past few years, where it portrays the Pacific Ocean as an unknown space. It expresses somewhat nostalgic and melancholy feelings through my concurrent presence and absence in the water. The egg shape symbolises a closed psyche, repressed and unknown. In her insomnia drawings, Louise Bourgeois drew skein-like lines, shaping waves and circles. The character of these drawings is loose, intuitive and repetitive. The peaks and circles are drawn repetitively in limited colours.

Bourgeois’ insomnia drawing was a literal means to overcome her insomnia and rest her nerves.18 It wasn’t that I was influenced by these works from Bourgeois and Miss X. My work was made before I found these pieces. What we see in their unintentional

17 Joan Chodorow, Jung On Active Imagination (London: Routledge, 1997), 98–99. 18 Lynn Margaret Imperatore, "Drawing On A Dream," process. arts/Drawing Out 2012 (2012): accessed February 28, 2012, http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/drawing?dream

similarities is the appearance of the archetypes of a collective subconscious. When I found these relationships I developed a strong empathetic feeling with these women, which led me to explore archetypal symbolism further.

These are three works by different women from different places, yet each produces a similar nuanced feeling through the archetypal symbol of water. Philip Wheelwright has discussed the meaning of water:

Water: the mystery of creation; birth-death-resurrection; purification and redemption; fertility and growth. According to Carl Jung, water is the most common symbol for the unconscious. The Sea: the mother of all life; spiritual mystery and infinity; death and rebirth; timelessness and eternity; the unconscious.19

As these three examples show, the unknown familiar implies a provocation of both personal and collective feelings in order to reflect reality. Water is a highly personal yet commonly used symbol to express emotional difficulty, insecure feelings and anxieties that underlie the unconscious. Water as the main symbol in both personal and archetypal imagery for ‘unknown’ keeps appearing in my work. I will keep discuss ‘archetype’ as the key to access analysing the ‘unknown familiar’ in following chapters.

1.3. Methodology

My specific approach to visualising the feeling of insecurity through the aesthetic of the unknown familiar is symbolism through image association, which really refers to a mind association through imagery.

19 Philip Wheelwright, "The Archetypal Symbol," Perspectives in Literary Symbolism 1 (1968): 214–243.

The Cognition of Feelings Through Image Association

Drawn imagery, whether it derives from visuals, sounds or verbal language, shapes certain ideas. There is a constant relationship between images and ideas: images draw ideas and ideas draw images. The drawn image activates my imagination, and this is my main methodology of creating visual symbols. Caterina Albano has said that ‘imagery, as a result of sensorial stimuli, is integral to the brain’s working and contributes to the formation of subjectivity.’20 When I create a visual image it is an organic process of emotive-cognition; it is through interaction between information learnt from life experience and the spirituality of nature that we understand our reality as our notion is to understand the world from both our conscious and subconscious.

My process of image collection/generation is similar to word association.21 One image leads to another, and they interact with each other, building new relationships unconsciously. I choose certain images of objects or words consciously, but then the next image at which I arrive is more intuitive and more closely aligned to my subconscious.

As an example, 2011 was the Year of Rabbit, and images of rabbits were everywhere. I adopted a picture of a Flemish Giant rabbit from the Internet to make a series of rabbit drawings in which I engaged with the image through archetypal and personal meanings.

It made me think of Easter eggs; it reminded me of a Korean folk story about a rabbit making rice cakes in the moon; and the moon, for some reason, reminds me of the

20 Albano, Fear and Art in The Contemporary World, 130.

21 “Definition of word association in English, “ Oxford Dictionaries, accessed July 11, 2010, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/word-association?q=word+association

Spielberg movie E.T. The image of the moon led me to explore from one image to another the whole journey, beginning with a rabbit from the online news. Its beginning was to be expected, it was the Year of Rabbit so there were more chances of being exposed to images of rabbits, and I had wished to be more productive and creative so I employed the cultural meaning of rabbits as symbolising fertility and productivity. This was a personal and metaphoric gesture that I initiated as my own ritual to begin the New

Year. It was consciously decided, however the following process of image association was intuitive, though it reflected my wishes to overcome the feeling of insecurity. The found image opened my imagination and brought unconscious desires. It activated the organic journey of creating narratives, leading to the finished works (figs. 11–14). This image association through symbolic meaning and metaphor is how I visualise my feelings.

Figure 11 (left): Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, 120 x 90cm.

Figure 12 (centre): Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, 120 x 90cm.

Figure 13 (right): Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2011. Mixed media on canvas, 120 x 90cm.

Metaphoric Tales and Symbols

The imagination is activated through image association, and through this process I employ the linguistic function of visual images, metaphor and symbolism. We can begin to see the linguistic role of visual narrative through the comments of Susanne K.

Langer:

Language, of course, is our prime instrument of conception expression. The things we can say are in effect the things we can think. Words are the term of our thinking as well as the term in which we present thoughts…without words, sense experience is only a flow of impressions as subjective as our feelings: words make it objective and carve it up into things and facts that we can note, remember and think about. Language gives outward experience its form and makes it definite clear.22

But dealing with visual language is more ambiguous than verbal language. In my visual narrative metaphors and symbols are not simply distinguishable, since one can become the other depending on context. Metaphor is more subjective, abstract and personal. It is a way of expressing feelings that I cannot simply articulate in verbal language. Its original meaning is displaced and replaced with the new meanings we intend to imply.

In this way metaphor opens our imagination by reinforcing metaphysical ideas and feelings that we cannot clearly verbalise. Metaphor is thus an indirect means of explanation. Conversely, metaphor can also take away the author’s intended meaning and replace it with viewer’s interpretation. I have discussed above how I employ certain imagery to express feelings and thoughts, for example water as a metaphor for ‘my own

Pacific Ocean’. This Pacific Ocean is the background of my story, representing feelings related to personal, cultural and geographical identity. It is a metaphor for nomadic, nostalgic and insecure feelings. Metaphor opens emotive cognition by placing my

22 Susanne K. Langer, Philosophical Sketches: (New York: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), 88.

intended meaning within the image of water. Mark Johnson asserted the role of metaphor:

We now recognise metaphor to be a fundamental principle of human understanding that operates in all forms of our symbolic activity. Consequently, a person's view of metaphor has become a divining rod with which to discover his most basic philosophical commitments about the mind, knowledge, and language.23

Symbols, on the other hand, rely on external ideas. A symbol is a common agreement amongst people and is more the product of social context. If metaphor is closer to real personal feeling, then a symbol is the carrier of that feeling. In Man and His Symbols,

Jung wrote:

What we call symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning.24

Aniela Jaffe says that everything can assume a symbolic meaning.25 Within my work I use various symbolic motifs such as animals, natural objects, man-made objects, organic abstract shapes and colours to represent my emotions and thoughts. I employ them as a vocabulary to visualise thoughts, emotions and ideas. There are also pictorial symbols widely used in religious paintings in the Middle Ages, the golden ages of Western art, and Asian religious art.

23 Mark Johnson, et al. "Metaphor." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed August 19, 2012, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e03512. 24 Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols (London: Pan Books, 1978), 3. 25 Aniela Jaffé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts” In Man and His Symbols ed. Carl Gustuv Jung and Marie- Luise von Franz, 257

The modern concept of symbolism emerged with impressionism in 18th century

Europe. Paul Gauguin was at the forefront of symbolism in France during this time.26

Art theorist Julius Kaplan states that Gauguin

…believed that the emotional response to nature is more important than the intellectual; that lines, colours and even numbers communicate meaning; that intuition is crucial to artistic creation; and that one should communicate ideas and feelings derived from nature by means of the simplest forms, after dreaming in front of the subject.27

George Dickie argues that the spiritual value of symbolism vanished after Duchamp devised the ready-made object with his Fountain.28 The spiritual value of the artistic symbol is an important aspect of my work, which I will discuss further in Chapter 3.

Analysing symbols in personal narrative is not easy, especially in an era of post- postmodern thinking where everything can be a symbol of everything else.29 For myself, the symbol’s relationship between language and imagery is a great vehicle to express the aesthetics of emotions in reality. In my work there are symbolic images like fish, wings, organs, body parts, letters, plastic bags, geometric shapes, an egg, the moon, a spaceship, the house, trees and water. Accessing one image leads to another. I tend to select images that are wishful, sentimental and nostalgic, which convey a sense of my emotional state. I also draw images from my cultural consumption of movies, pop songs, literature and folklore.

26 Kaplan Julius, "Symbolism." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed March 9, 2013, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T082761. 27 Ibid. 3 28 George Dickie, "What is Art? An Institutional Analysis," in The Philosophy of the Visual Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 438. 29 Nealon, Post-Postmodernism.

The psychological motivation of my symbolism is similar to that Yoon Yeol-su describes as the auspicious symbols of Korean folk painting. Korean folk painting in the

Chosŏn Dynasty was an informal art by ordinary people, reflecting their wishes and cultural desires, such as longevity, fertility, and happiness. People believed these auspicious symbols brought luck and protected them from negative energy (fig 14).30

Figure 14: Symbols in Korean folk art

Folk painting illustrates everyday life with various cultural symbols such as animals, domestic objects, natural objects, geometric shapes and Chinese characters. Symbolic meaning in a cultural context like folk art usually derives from the archetypal character of the substance represented. Rabbits appear as a symbol of fertility and longevity, and

30 Yeolsu Yoon, Folk Painting (London: Laurence King, 2003), 7–15.

the tiger is a symbol of power and courage.31 I devise my imagery in a similar manner to these auspicious symbols, reflecting feelings of insecurity and presenting my wishes to confront anxiety. For example, there are fish, wings and rabbits in my drawings (fig.

15). Fish and birds symbolise free movement and rabbits symbolise productivity and creativity. The motivation behind a wishful symbol is psychological insecurity. So if metaphor is the agency of feeling, then symbols are the vehicle to carry it through its archetypal significance.

Figure 15: Yiwon Park, Personal Symbols, 2009. Pencil on paper, 28 x 23cm each.

31 Ibid.

This characteristic of symbols also appears in Australian Aboriginal art (fig. 16), which like the symbols of Korean folk art are rooted in an indigenous culture’s reflection on spirituality. The visual characteristics of symbols in Korean folk painting and Australian

Aboriginal painting are noticeably different. Symbols in Australian Aboriginal painting are the key element for describing Dreamtime stories, however, archetypal characteristics can be read in each culture’s symbolism.

Figure 16: Australian Aboriginal symbols,

In my work there are geometric shapes such as circles, cubes, and various polygons, which represent the unknown statement of self and space. When I draw a geometric shape I normally begin by drawing lines from one point to the other. I draw one circle and another, and intuitively draw lines and shapes around them. Repeating this process brings specific images to mind through associative imagery. During the process, a dot becomes a line and the line forms various shapes. I sometimes see a face, or the mandala, and sometimes nothing at all. These are pure forms of symbols that come directly from myself through my body and my subconscious.

Overall, my work draws from both personal and archetypal symbolism to visualise my feelings through metaphoric tales. This symbolic imagery derives from multiple cultural influences and is an intuitive artistic practice generated through image association. My feelings of insecurity inhabit the gap between the personal and archetypal meanings of such symbols, and within this tension lies the unknown familiar.

Chapter 2: Narrative

Figure 17: Yiwon Park, Life is a Boiled Egg, 2012, Mixed media on canvas, 160 x 260cm

In this chapter I discuss symbolism and narrative from three different perspectives: psychological, cultural, and mythological. My focus in this analysis is on what I have termed the unknown familiar, or the relationship between collective unconscious and individual sensitivity. The three perspectives are connected, as visual narrative is ultimately interlaced with the psychological, cultural and mythological perspectives.

The motivation of my own practice is dominantly the psychological perspective, though it is framed by cultural circumstance and rooted in primordial human nature.

2.1. A Psychological Perspective

Emotion as Raw Material

The autobiographical nature of my work tells psychological tales through personal metaphor. My resources for art making are my own stories and their emotional qualities.

I use life experience as my raw material, like the French artist Louise Bourgeois who employed personal emotions and memories as major motifs to explore the psychological stories of her inner self. As Jung remarked about the relationship between emotion and the unconscious, ‘the raw material of the unconscious is mainly emotions, impulses and it may be an irrational emotional outburst’.32

I transform my feelings into narrative, and in this way the process of visualising images becomes a process of discovering myself through relationships between different realms of reality. What I witness in both Bourgeois’ work and my own process is the artist as a generator of narratives that lie beneath the conscious and subconscious, where we employ personal feelings from life experience. Narratives drawn from everyday life document and reflect my personal identity. Here I look at Bourgeois’ personal symbols through which she describes painful memories.

Body, Memory and Emotion

Caterina Albano wrote that ‘Bourgeois calls upon the psychic realm of fears as a shared and yet intimate experience.’33 The domestic female body is a recurring subject for

Bourgeois. She produced Femme Maison (Woman House) during 1946–1947, early in her career after she moved to America (fig. 18).

32 Chodorow, Jung On Active Imagination, 6. 33 Albano, Fear and Art in The Contemporary World, 81.

Figure 18: Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1946-1947. Oil and ink on linen, 91.4 x 35.6 cm.

Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth, Photo: Rafael Lobato.

Employing the house and female body as symbolic images she illustrates her psychological state in a descriptive narrative form. Bourgeois’ house is a psychological space that draws on the frustration of conflicting emotions. It is a site of anxious memories rather than comfort. In Femme Maison the house is interpreted as a symbol of her relationships with ‘home’ and family in France and America.34 She presents the woman-house, her body combined with architecture, which looks as though she is wearing the house, leaving the bottom part of her body exposed. She appears burdened

34 Charlotta Kotik, “Introduction,” in Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory: Works 1982-1993: [exhibition]. Edited by Charlotta Kotik, (New York: Abrams, 1994), 19–22.

by the house. In the first panel, bundles of lines are drawn out of a window on top of the house. The second painting contains two female bodies, one as a house and the other hidden by a painted flower on the red wall background; again bundles of lines thread out of the house toward the flower. In the third painting three arms reach out of the windows, and the figure looks like it is jumping, or trying to escape or surrender. Here, ambiguity is the key to conjoin the viewer’s engagement and the artist’s narrative.

When Bourgeois’ personal story evokes my own personal story that I put aside, the resulting experience is best described as uncanny: familiar yet unknown and instigating fear. Christian Leigh discusses this feeling as it occurs in the artistic practice of Louise

Bourgeois. Leigh argues that Bourgeois’ engagement of painful emotions through symbolism resonate feelings of the uncanny. Bourgeois reflects on childhood trauma and painful memories through peculiar objects:

These works engage with us to converse with ourselves in ways that can often be difficult or painful. Like those strange moments when a flash of light, a colour, a voice, or a smell tips of unconscious, the Bourgeois object calls up bizarre uninvited memory that has the power to bring on sadness, regret, mourning.35

She often re-enacts uncomfortable and painful emotions through unexpected combinations of objects and body parts. The Uncanny occurs when her visual language stirs our subconscious with tragically described unpleasant feelings. However, in spite of their absurd and discomforting emotional experience, her works evoke empathy for her feelings through their archetypal symbolism.

35 Terrie Sultan and Christian Leigh, “The Earrings of Madame B…: Louise Bourgeois and The Reciprocal Terrain of Uncanny”, in Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory: Works 1982–1993: [Exhibition]. Edited by Charlotta Kotik (New York: Abrams, 1994), 54.

My work calls upon the same mechanisms as Bourgeois. I combine personal symbolic imagery to turn the symbols into hybrid figures. In Unknown Familiar Story (fig. 19) I drew a figure in the middle of space: a water-filled egg combined with my legs (the body part I expose most in my work as a symbol of self). There is an upside down lung drawn on top of the egg shape. This self-portrait describes insecure feelings of being alone in an unknown place. I combine four elements to portray this feeling. The mixed metaphor expresses the ambivalent feeling of my insecurity. The shape of the egg symbolises birth, yet it is also a locked space. The lung symbolises breath and life.

Being in the space alone, without any clues as to where this is, represents the insecure feeling of being but not belonging. In this way, I can analyse my insecurity, which appears through various symbolic images.

Figure 19: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar Story, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 21 cm.

Figure 20: Yiwon Park, Unknown Familiar, 2012. Mixed media on paper, 21 x 30cm.

Referring to her installation work Cell (fig. 21), Bourgeois commented:

The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. What happens to my body has to be given a formal abstract shape. So, you might say, pain is the random of formalism. The existence of pains cannot be denied…. The Cells represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional and the mental and intellectual. Each Cell deals with fear. Fear is pain. Often it is not perceived as pain, because it is always disguising itself36

The Cell series comprises closed room-like spaces containing various objects and sculptures. Inside these cells Bourgeois displays old furniture, domestic objects and a glass sphere, carved body parts and mirror. With Cell, Bourgeois associatively reconstructs feelings of memories with symbolic objects, and narration is delineated through the juxtaposed artifacts. The absurd relationship between the objects suggests emotional paradox. The scene illustrates the subject of pain stemming from traumatic memory. All of this occurs within the closed form of the cell, where these stories are only seen from the outside. This sealed space reveals Bourgeois’ psychological interaction with reality, and the induced voyeurism boosts the aesthetic feeling of the uncanny.

36 qtd in Christian Leigh, “The Earrings of Madame B…: Louise Bourgeois and The Reciprocal Terrain of Uncanny”, in Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory: Works 1982–1993 [exhibition]. Edited by Charlotta Kotik, (New York: Abrams, 1994), 61.

Figure 21: Louise Bourgeois, Cell (Choisy), 1990–1993. Mixed media, size variable. Collection

Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto, Photo: Marcus Leith.

Deconstructed body parts carry Bourgeois’ autobiographical narrative; they are her alter egos. Holding hands carved of marble, a spiral woman, and the arch-backed female body substitute herself in her memories. Thus the substance of her existence emerged in this emotional narrative. Similarly, feelings of insecurity are the subject of my narrative, where I use my body as a medium to draw my story (figs. 22–24). The body is physical evidence of my existence, and container of my physical and mental memories of life experience. It is from the body, through the body, and employing the body that the story is carried. However, unlike Bourgeois, I display my story in open space, searching for an interactive connection and the empathy of the viewer. I intentionally leave empty space around the figure to invite viewers in.

Figure 22: Yiwon Park, Untitled, 2012. Mixed media on cotton, 100 x 100cm.

Figure 23: Yiwon Park, You Were Not There, 2012. Mixed media on cotton, 120 x 90cm.

Figure 24: Yiwon Park, I Was There, 2012. Mixed media on cotton, 120 x 90cm.

2.2. A Cultural perspective

The Image of Hell in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delight and the Korean Buddhist Painting Jiokdo

As with Bourgeois’ construction of memory, narrative can be generated from a psychological perspective where personal symbols embody feelings. But narrative can also be formed through cultural references, a theme that I now turn my attention to through the example of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delight (fig. 25).

Within this work lies the woven interaction between an individual and his religious culture. Dealing particularly with death and the collective fear of hell, I explore the subject of this painting from the worldview Bosch knew from religion. In this context, I discuss expressing my fear about the death of identity, and cultural influences on symbolism in my work. As Bosch draws on religious culture, I include cultural consumption in my personal narrative and my cultural identity.

Figure 25: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delight, c.1503–1504. Oil on wood panels, 220 x 389cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

According to German historian Wilhelm Fraenger, Bosch’s personal life has had little historical exposure.37 The artist painted highly complex psychological, cultural and primordial scenes of the 16th century, but his inner life has been largely veiled. To unravel the mystery of Bosch, we can approach him from a cultural perspective of the narrative.

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delight describes the human psyche in great visual detail through highly complex symbols that provoke the instinctive aspect of mankind. This painting was made in the 16th century, when religion was a powerful force in European culture and most art practice was related to religious practice. It consists of three sequential panels: the Garden of Eden, Paradise of the Millennium and Hell, which describe the causes and consequences of human life in three characteristic scenes. The first panel describes the birth of humanity, showing Adam and Eve and God’s presence in Eden. There is the Tree of Life and the animals and mythical creatures that populate the land of milk and honey. The following panels are more complex. Bosch explores his vision of life, nature and religious doctrine through a series of racy metaphors. In

Paradise of the Millennium there are fountains and pools with abstract forms that represent male and female. The people and animals walk around the pool in a circle and luscious tropical fruits are vividly depicted. Horses, fish, birds and shells harmonise with humans to perform some kind of ritual. The last panel, Hell, I see as the most interesting as it uses complex symbols to make the fearful scene believable.

37 Wilhelm Fraenger, Hieronymus Bosch (Dresden: Art Stock, 1994), 9–10.

Bosch’s painting shows cause and consequence through its narrative sequence. The surreal landscape explores a peculiar visual vocabulary through mixed metaphors.

Hell’s pictorial narrative shows punishment after life. Most religious ideas of hell impose punishment; the moral authority of religion within the social structure of

Bosch’s time was maintained by fear punishment in the next life. The reason I discuss his painting through a cultural perspective is because ideas of Adam and Eve and hell are generated by cultural understandings rather than the artist’s inner world. But it is interesting to note that when we evaluate Bosch’s vocabulary in his religious context it appears rather unorthodox and perhaps even heretical. This is supported by Fraenger:

As a pioneer of genre and landscape painting he freed medieval art from its subjection to the church and, in the phantom world that he made his own creative domain, distorted the fear of God, which the church kept under control, into a terrifying pandemonium of lust. Similarly this triptych occupies the gap opened by a new religious will to life, which clashed with the tradition of the church.38

Curiously enough, Bosch’s Hell is echoed by the portrayal of hell found in the Korean

Buddhist painting Jiokdo (fig. 26).39 Both describe hell as a fearful and painful space.

The subjects of immortality and the next life are driven by fear in both Hell and Jiokdo.

There, humans suffer with painful punishment and the fear of judgment. Despite differences in culture and place, the depiction of fire to symbolise fear and pain appears in both, in which human bodies suffer, tortured by evils. This kind of pain is different from that of burning your finger on a flame while you are cooking, it is an undiscovered and mysterious pain that exists in our imagination rather than as a physical sensation.

38 Fraenger, Hieronymus Bosch, 15. 39 Henrik Hjort Sorensen, The Iconography of Korean Buddhist Painting (Leiden: Brill, 1989).

Figure 26: Jiokdo (detail – hell), 파주 보광사 명부전 지옥도 .

For John Berger, knowledge and belief influence the way we see things:

The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. In the Middle Ages when men believed in the physical existence of Hell the sight of fire must have meant something different from what it means today40

As both works deal with the invisible and non-material substance of fear, it becomes so obscure that it carries the same sense of the uncanny that Bourgeois brought to her art.

Just as Bourgeois’ business was conveying the pain and fear of her memories, the hells of Bosch and Jiokdo describe the pain and fear of the next life, which is all the more terrifying because it is unknown. In both cases the feeling of the uncanny dwells in our mind when we face these unknown and invisible realms of reality through visible symbolic substance.

40 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 2008), 9.

Images Collected Through Cultural Consumption

Albano commented that contemporary insecurity is focused on a personal self-conscious level rather than a collective one. This anxiety is more related to what Joyce Carol Oates described in The Aesthetics of Fear:

What we fear most, I suggest, is not death; not even physical anguish, mental decay disintegration. We fear most the loss of meaning. To lose meaning is to lose one's humanity, and this is more terrifying than death; for death itself, in a coherent cultural context, always has meaning. It is the anxiety of the individual that the very species may become extinct in our complexity with the predator- cannibal/vampire-within. These fears, anxieties, these recurring and compulsive nightmares, so powerfully dramatised by artists of the tragic and the grotesque through centuries, are not aberrations. The aesthetic of fear is the aesthetic of our common humanity.41

The anxiety of uncertain existence is close to the death of meaning in culture. I draw my own stories relying on psychological feelings to confirm my existence. I express my cultural influences through a visual vocabulary of collected images. I collect symbolic images from everyday life that I believe can express my feelings and thoughts. These are adapted from songs, movies, literature and the things I choose to consume, and employed as metaphors for feeling. Living in a visual world we are surrounded by images. We are consumers of these, but can also become creators when we draw on those images from our personal, social and cultural perspectives. For example, in going to someone’s house you see all the things they have collected or bought that represent their lives. This is visualisation, an image creation of something unseen: their personality. These artefacts become anthropological research material to analyse contemporary culture and life.

41 Joyce Carol Oates,"The Aesthetics of Fear," Salmagundi 120 (1998): 176–185.

I build my narratives by borrowing stories from different sources of cultural consumption and mixing them together. In developing stories, symbolic images form their own metaphoric meanings. The metaphors from collected imagery open multiple layers of meaning within that gap between their archetypal and personal meanings. To illustrate, in terms of describing the indescribable feeling of being, I employ the symbol of the plastic bag from the American pop song Firework by Katy Perry (fig. 27):42 ‘Do you ever feel like a plastic bag? Do you ever feel like paper thin?’ (figs. 28–29).43 How does one know how it feels to be a plastic bag or paper-thin? We can understand because we know the universal meaning of what a plastic bag represents and how it is used (fig. 30). It has the function of containing things, it is disposable, light, convenient and not valuable. Katy Perry also sings about this feeling of not being valuable.

42 Katy Perry, born 1984, American singer/songwriter. 43 Katy Perry, Firework (Capitol/Virgin, 2010).

Figure 27: Katy Perry, Firework album cover

Figure 30: An image of a plastic bag chosen from a random internet search

Figures 28–29: Yiwon Park, Do You Ever Feel Like A Plastic Bag?, 2011. Mixed media on paper,

30 x 20cm each.

I have also used an image of the spaceship from the movie E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial’44 in my painting (figs. 31–32). In the movie, an alien is separated from its family, lost on the unknown planet Earth. How frustrating! He has no contact with home, and has a totally different language and appearance. He begins to search for ways home. By adopting the image, I also borrow the context of the story from the movie and build it into my narrative. This is a movie I grew up with. Both Katy Perry’s song and E.T. are cultural consumptions from my everyday life, cultural symbols that become my personal metaphors. If I were born in Bosch’s time, I would not have used a plastic bag to express my feelings. Or if I lived before E.T. was made, I could quote the same spaceship to describe the nomadic feeling of frustration. In the same way, Bosch would have painted very different symbols than Adam and Eve and Hell were he alive today.

Figure 31: Movie poster for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Figure 32: Yiwon Park, I must phone home?, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30cm.

44 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is a 1982 American science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg.

Images, John Berger argues, come from absence, and their creation replaces that absence:

Later still, with the increasing consciousness of the individual, the image was recognised as the particular vision of a particular artist. Nothing else documents the past so well, and the more imaginative the work, the more we can understand the artist’s experience of the world… Unfortunately, when images from the past are presented as works of art, their meanings are obscured (mystified) by learnt assumptions such as beauty, truth, form etc. Our understanding of history will always change as we change. However, this cultural mystification results both in making the images seem more remote, and allows us to draw fewer conclusions from history.

Figure 33: Yiwon Park, Egg Moon With Rabbit Ear, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30cm.

Figure 34: Hieronymus Bosch, detail from The Garden of Earthly Delight.

2.3. A Mythological Perspective

As symbols are drawn from culture, personal narrative has the potential to become a platform for public mythology. Myth reflects the collective unconscious, and personal narrative is in a position to create new myths as well as being influenced by existing myths. This section looks at myth as a primordial response to fear in narrative form.

What I mean by primordial or primitive is that the narrative is an instinctive response, related to a fear or uncertainty of our nature and survival. These individual stories meet in the metaphorical river to become myths.45

Mythology

Figure 35: Yiwon Park, Red Riding Blanket, 2013. Acrylic on paper, 25 x 35cm.

45 Pinkola Estes, “Introduction,” in Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 17.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that

myths are still widely interpreted in conflicting ways: collective dreams, the outcome of kind esthetic play, the foundation of ritual… Mythological figures are considered as personified abstractions, divinized heroes or decayed gods.46

In most human cultures we find traces of these myths: heroes, Messianic figures and symbols of power (figs. 36–38). Vampire myths represent the fear of mortality and the desire for immortality. Heroes in stories manifest our desire to overcome the threshold of being human. These figures represent our striving against the deeply rooted fears of being human. Art theorist Caroline Jones encapsulates this at the beginning of her article Doubt Fear.

Fear. The most ancient of vehement passions, the most basic of the chemically triggered impulses we call emotions. A loud noise, the acrid scent of a predator, a sudden movement caught in peripheral vision, the gathering dusk-fear is an evolved response to such stimuli.47

Although different myths emerge from culture to culture, we find similar archetypal symbols across these diverse stories. We continue to create virtual Messiah images to deal with invisible fear and uncertainty. They appear as a thousand of different gods, superheroes, vampires, princesses and princes in popular culture.

46 Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," The Journal of American Folklore 68:270 (1955): 428–444. 47 Caroline A Jones, “Doubt Fear,” Art Papers, January/February, 2005, accessed June 25, 2013, http://www.artpapers.org/feature_articles/feature1_2005_0102.htm.

Figure 36 (left): Jesus Christ.

Figure 37 (centre): Seated Buddha, Unified Silla dynasty, 8th century. Granite, h.326 cm.

Sokkuram Cave-Temple, Gyongju, South Gyongsang Province National Treasure no. 24.

Figure 38 (right): Movie poster, Superman Returns.

For example, Wandjina is a spiritual character of Australian Dreamtime mythology that represents the spirit of clouds, rain and fertility.48 Wandjina’s origin remains uncertain, but characters like Wandjina appear as symbols of power to overcome fear and control our mundane lives. They mostly resemble human figures, but they exceed the threshold of human ability to deal with supernatural powers of nature. It is the disguised substance of fear. The Wandjina figure is usually painted in natural pigment, in limited colours such as black, white and brown, with black circular eyes and nose and a circular face

(fig. 39). It has black lines radiating from its head and eyes, creating an alien-like image.

48 Frederick O’Connor, Ursula O’Connor and Sue O’Connor, "Wandjina, graffiti and heritage," in Compelling Cultures: Representing Cultural Diversity and Cohesion in Multicultural Australia, ed. Paul Pickering et al. (Canberra: ANU E press, 2009), 161-165

Figure 39: Wandjina with black-cockatoo feathers painted in Otilyiyalyangngarri Cave, Mount

Barnett, WA, 13 April 1985. Photograph courtesy of Kim Akerman.

What does Wandjina do and why do people from primitive cultures create characters like Wandjina? Wandjina symbolises the spirit that controls the weather. Let us consider the importance of weather as a critical issue of human life at that time. Weather is directly related to the sustenance of life, where obtaining food and keeping safe from storms and the cold are essential survival issues. Also, nature provides nutrition and energy; people can grow crops or hunt animals and build shelters in the natural environment. But at the same time nature creates great uncertainty, which threatens human life. Wandjina is an auspicious symbol of the Aboriginal people that reflects this insecurity. The symbol is a psychological projection of their culture. However, let us think about this fear and anxiety as we deal with it today. People in the 21st century may see less uncertainty in weather as science and technology have developed advanced

weather forecast systems, but weather and nature are still great uncertainties in our world. To exaggerate, the weatherman and the meteorological observatory are contemporary versions of Wandjina, where collective fear of uncertainty is reflected as a mythological public figure. The interesting point is that although specific narratives produce unique embodiments of public mythology through archetypal symbols, these figures often resemble each other. The archetype exists in various forms as narratives develop through time.

Disguise

In this context, the figures in my work are a projection of my insecurity, my own

Wandjina. I see various versions of Wandjina and other auspicious symbols in my everyday life that aim to overcome insecure feelings. So my work is not only influenced by existing myths, but shapes my own myths as well. It disguises concerns with symbolic images of animals, trees and ambiguous geometric shapes, which become personal totems for my own wishes and desires. Animals in particular, as kinsmen of humans, are used to represent different aspects of human nature. In mythology, animals, trees and other creatures are commonly personified or communicate with humans. For example, Jaffé writes that

The symbolic function of the mask is the same as that of the original animal disguise. Individual human expression is submerged, but in its place the wearer assumes the dignity and the beauty (and also the horrifying expression) of an animal demon. In psychological terms, the mask transforms its wearer into archetypal image.49

49 Jaffé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts,”263

This aspect of the animal mask, or disguise, is an essential part of how I incorporate these symbols into my own personal narratives. I turn myself into my own myth through disguise. Just as anything is possible in mythology, the uncanny is brought forth through disguised characters whose personification brings an absurd empathy between substances. In my work, animal symbols like the rabbit are drawn from Asian myth: the rabbit is one of 12 animals that symbolise the 12 year cycle of the Korean zodiac.50 I personify the animals and objects to create my personal mythology of an unknown familiar, trying to transcend insecure feeling through auspicious symbols. I disguise the rabbit as my personal metaphor through this cultural symbolism (fig. 40).

Figure 40: Yiwon Park, How To Play A Rabbit, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 30 x 20cm each.

On the creation of mythology through the artwork, we must respond to Lévi-Strauss’ questioning of the arbitrariness and paradoxical nature of myth. He discussed the structures of myth as expanding beyond social hierarchies and relations, to the cosmological and supernatural. These are elements I observe in the work of American

50 Yeolsu Yoon, Folk Painting (London: Laurence King, 2003), 359.

artist Kiki Smith. Smith explores subjects of personal emotional quality through her inter-disciplinary practice. The dynamic interaction between drawings and sculpture installation offers a great stage for her mythological narrative, where she engages animals and symbols of the natural environment (figs. 42, 44).

Figure 41:Yiwon Park, How could I cross my pacific ocean, resin sculture and Manly sand, installation size 150 x 60 x 30 cm

Figure 42: Kiki Smith, Mine, 1999. Glass, 38 units vary from 95 x 11 x 12cm to 18 x 18 x 10cm.

Photo by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy of Pace Wildenstein, New York.

Smith draws herself with mythical animal symbols. Martin Hentschel wrote that Smith deployed animal symbols ‘as our fellow creatures and the secret kinsmen of our psyches

... her installation explored cosmological inquiries.’51 Her work involves mythological

Christian themes and fairy tales, with a main focus being the depiction of woman as close to nature. Her sculptures, combining animal motifs and herself, are reminiscent of how tribal groups engage with animal masks to draw out humanity’s primitive instincts.

Smith’s engagement with animals and cosmological symbols is an intuitive interaction with nature. Smith’s internalised narrative resembles Bourgeois’ psychological narrative, however Smith also sought a greater connection to the unknown outside world. As she herself reflected in 1994, her work has evolved from ‘inside and outside’ of her body and her willingness to wander around the landscape. This suggests that

Smith’s work delves from her inner stories into archetypal symbols of mythology.

In my own narrative, I locate the mythological perspective in the crafty way I work to unscramble the complexity of the ‘fundamental feeling common to the whole of mankind’ through auspicious symbolism.52 This echoes Lévi-Strauss’ conception of myth, as it aims to explain phenomena beyond our understanding.

51 Martin Hentschel, Kiki Smith: Her Home (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2008). 52 Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," The Journal of American Folklore 68:270 (1955): 428–444.

Figure 43: Yiwon Park, Self-portraits, 2010, ceramic, height 18cm.

Figure 44: Kiki Smith, Sirens, 2007. Set of six cast bronze sculptures with black patina, size variable, Matt Suib and Ellen Page Wilson.

This chapter has analysed three perspectives from which to view the power of symbols, which are inscribed in my visual narratives but can also be recognised in other artists’ works. I approach my symbols from both personal and cultural perspectives. I then evolve a mythological perspective in my visual narrative as I draw upon my feelings of insecurity through engaging with cultural resources. Hence, the unknown familiar story explores my personal mythology.

Chapter 3: Responses to the feeling of insecurity

Figure 45: Yiwon Park, When The Night Falls Into Me, 2013. Mixed media on paper, 25 x 35cm.

The previous chapter has analysed three perspectives from which to view the power of symbols, which are inscribed in my visual narratives but can also be recognised in other artists’ works. I approach my symbols from both personal and cultural perspectives. I then evolve a mythological perspective in my visual narrative as I draw upon my feelings of insecurity through engaging with cultural resources. Hence, the unknown familiar story explores my personal mythology.

During the analysis of my work, I realised that I not only express my feelings but also investigate ways to overcome them through art making. I analysed my narrative from sociological and anthropological points of view, in the psychological and cultural perspectives outlined in Chapter 2. As my research developed, I began to explore more

of the mythological perspective. In borrowing Lévi-Strauss’ words, my personal mythologies become the foundation of ritual, positioning my practice in ritualistic context.53

Having established these critical factors, I now return to the symbolism of Chapter 1 to suggest my own response to feelings of insecurity. As I discussed, insecurity is the psychological motivation of my art practice, but also reflects the wider cultural and collective fears discussed through Chapters 1 and 2. I have been analysing this unknown feeling through symbols, metaphor and visual narrative. Here I discuss my art practice in ritualistic context to reconcile the nature of life, its uncertainty and complexity. I discuss personal narrative in art making as a ritualistic activity to overcome this fearful emotion that is deeply rooted in my mythology.

3.1. Beuys’ and Namjun Paik’s response: The Artist as Shaman

Reconciling Fear and connecting with different realms of reality

There was a ritualistic manner to Joseph Beuys’ practice, an approach to

‘anthropological art’ in response to trauma and anxiety. Alain Borer has analysed Beuys through his various roles.54 Beuys manifested himself as an ‘artist as a modern shaman’, and a ‘healer’. Beuys asserted that the artist’s role is to become a medium that engages spirituality and reconciles social fear, which was motivated by his life-changing experiences during the Second World War. The famous anecdote of his rescue by the

53 Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," The Journal of American Folklore, 428-444. 54 Alain Borer, “A Lament for Joseph Beuys,” in The Essential Joseph Beuys. Edited by Lothar Schirmer (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1997), 12–13.

Tartars in Crimea using fat and felt itself became myth.55 His near-death experience and rescue by this Asiatic tribal group inspired his art practice. He became a healer for a

’wounded’ German post-war society. Beuys played the role of Messiah, using art to overcome his fears from his traumatic experience of war.

Like Kiki Smith, Beuys engaged Celtic mythology to deliver similar archetypal symbols and create his own myths. Beuys used a dead hare as his personal totem to play the man with spirituality. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), he covered his face with honey and gold leaves, and wandered around a gallery with a dead hare (fig. 46).

Ulmer interpreted the honey and hare as a ‘model of thinking’, ‘birth’, energy and creativity in Beuys’ grammatology.56 His narrative from honey to the dead hare evokes sensational attention within the archetypal meaning of symbols.

Figure 46: Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare at the Galerie Schmela in

Düsseldorf, 1965. Mervyn Horton Bequest Fund 1997.

55 Ibid. 56 Gregory Ulmer, “Performance: Joseph Beuys,” in Joseph Beuys: The Reader. Edited by Claudia Mesch and Viola Maria Michely (New York: I.B.TAURIS, 2007) 236.

Beuys employed specific materials such as felt, fat and animals (like the hare and coyote) as symbolic objects.57 These materials became his personal totems with special meanings in his rites. Beuys’ practice in the context of postmodernism defined the discourse on bringing spirituality back to art. Spirituality is a broad and vague term, though I try to focus on what Beuys implied as the anthropological context in his art, which is the ability to heal.

Beuys criticised Duchamp as ‘the terminator of modern art’ and tried to remind us of the artist’s abandoned role as the medium to connect with nature and its energies.58

Duchamp opened the door to every possibility of what art can be: at the moment of presenting the urinal as artwork, every object in the world was granted the potential disposition of art (fig. 47). The boundary between art and ordinary objects vanished.

Duchamp terminated modern art’s mystification through the connection of artist and spiritual aura yet he did not suggest an alternative to the artist’s role, a position that

Beuys challenged (fig. 48).59 This assertion relates to Albano’s comments, borrowing the words of John Armitage, on the accusation of the artist abandoning their role in

‘reassessing, creative practice and sensibilities, imagination and cultural meaning of the advanced society’.60

57 Ibid. 58 Antje Von Graevenitz, “Breaking the Silence: Joseph Beuys on His ‘Challenger’, Marcel Duchamp,” in Joseph Beuys: The Reader. Edited by Claudia Mesch and Maria Michely Viola (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 31. 59 Borer, “A Lament for Joseph Beuys,” in The Essential Joseph Beuys, 11. 60 Albano, “Introduction,” in John Armitage, Introduction to Art and Fear (London: Continuum, 2006), 15.

Figure 47: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Porcelain, 36 x 48 x 61cm.

Figure 48: Joseph Beuys, The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overated, 1964. Paper, oil, colour, ink, felt, chocolate and photography, 157 x 178 x 2 cm. Museum Schloss Moyland, Sammlung van der

In this context, my practice evolves Beuys’ assertion after Duchamp in developing an art practice through symbolism. As discussed in the previous chapter, I consider the images I consume in my everyday life to have the potentiality to become my subject.

Personal narrative and the reflection of my desires and fears within these visual symbols create their ritualistic meaning.

In this context, Beuys adopted natural symbols to generate the artist as a medium that connects with spirituality. Beuys asserted that ‘the primary anthropological material of mankind is thought, emotion and will,’61 and he himself, the artist as public figure, imbued anthropological meaning to his symbols. Here I could question what the

61 Ulmer, “Performance,” in Joseph Beuys: The Reader, 236.

difference is between ordinary fat and Beuys’ fat, which is essentially the kind of question Duchamp asked. However, while since Duchamp’s time everything can be a symbol of everything since, Beuys was ‘the archetypal trickster’.62 ‘His symbolism works on its archetypal function and evokes spiritual reconciliation.

In 1990, Beuys’ shamanic spirit was revived by Korean artist Nam June Paik, who, with

Beuys, was an active member of the Fluxus movement. Paik dedicated a performance for Beuys in the gallery Hyundai in Korea (fig. 49), where he wore a traditional Korean shaman’s costume and used Korean shamanic objects and objects to symbolise Beuys’ soul.63 There were 11 different elements, including rice, soil, water, and a piano. Each element symbolised a different natural energy. Shamans believe they are the medium that can reconnect different realms, such as the souls of the dead with the phenomenal world. Performance is the most common way for Shamans to generate verbal representations through the body. In the shamanistic ritual process, ordinary objects become very special. Rice is no longer just rice; soil is no longer soil. They inherit the artist’s psychological wishes.

62 Borer, “A Lament for Joseph Beuys,” in The Essential Joseph Beuys, 25. 63 오광수 . 시대 와 한국 미술 . 미진사 , Oh Kwang Soo, Era and Korean, (Mijinsa, 2007), 282.

Figure 49: Nam Jun Paik, Cherish Performance for Joseph Beuys, 1990.

3.2. My response

Inheriting a traditional Korean shamanistic culture, and advocating Beuys’ modern shaman’s spirit, I locate my art practice as a ritual performance to elicit my unconscious as a medium I apply to canvas, sculpture and most recently performance.

Telling Stories Through Drawing, Painting and Sculpture

In previous chapters I discussed how I engage with symbols to generate my narrative.

Creating visual images begins with drawing. I draw symbolic images on small pieces of paper with pencil, color pencil, pen, and watercolor. At this stage I think about how to represent my personal metaphoric meanings through symbols. I generate my story by playing with the metaphoric meaning bringing in further imagery. I also follow the tactile texture of the work by interacting with the materials and bodily sensation. I then

play with the developed symbolic images by placing them together in larger sized drawings and paintings. I consider activating the background more in painting than in drawing; the surface of a painting is a virtual space in which to tell the story, and so I aim to create a certain depth in illusion. I also make sculptures from ceramic, resin, canvas and other materials. Sculptural objects are more like my own personal totems, which retain my myths in tangible form.

The Altar: Installation

After his professional separation from Freud, Jung questioned what myth was to him with an introspective dialogue:

What myth does man live nowadays? In Christian myth, the answer might be, do you live in it? I ask myself. To be honest, the answer is no. For me, it is not what I live by, ‘then do we no longer have any myth? ‘No, evidently we no longer have any myth.’ ‘But then what is your myth? The myth in which you do live?’64

Jung later revisited his memory of building blocks, realising that he was ‘building small towns’ as a rite. He framed this as his ‘inner certainty that [he] was on the way to discovering [his] own myth’. 65 This is what I experience in activating my unconsciousness through image association. For me, creating an alter ego disguised as my personal symbols is also a rite to ‘discovering my own myth’. When I finally place my painting, drawing and sculptures together as an installation it becomes my own altar

(fig. 50).

64 Chodorow, Jung on Active Imagination, 23–24. 65 Ibid.

Figure 50: Yiwon Park, Personal Altar, 2013. Mixed media installation, size variable.

Personal Altar consists of various drawings, paintings and sculptures I produced over the years. The imagery in each work is a semiotic vocabulary of my personal symbols.

For me they are like the documentation of feelings in my memory, across various points of my own timeline, since as I made the works I was responding to my feelings at that moment. I present my story by putting different pages of my diary in a random order to break the narrative. The uncanny, in this instance, pertains to mixed metaphors in mixed memories. Personal Altar is my unknown familiar story.

When it comes to my performance work, it is the ritual ceremony embedded in a cultural context. My interest in symbolic personal experience and personal space, led me to take from my Altar and develop narratives through a performance series. In these works I use symbolic objects such as a letter or shoes, as well as space to make

connections between people, place and every other thing. I believe there are spontaneous forces and unknown factors around this connection. Performance is the rite that generates this feeling of unknown connections through body and objects. I intend to try to understand the connection between people around me through my body, a connection as the invisible drawing between us.

Perform though Personal Space

In 2012 I had the chance to perform in the group exhibition As Brave As You at Kudos

Gallery. The performance, Untold Artist Statement – The Letter That I Couldn’t Send, manifests the relationship between the artist’s statement and the viewer (fig. 52). This focused on the artist’s feelings of insecurity and uncertainty with regard to being connected with the audience. Here I present two mediums for the viewer to connect with my work: the video projection and myself. I sat inside a large paper envelope writing sentences from my artist’s statement while the projector showed the writing process through a web cam. In this way the audience can only see what the artist is trying to say through the projected image on the wall, not the actual writing on paper. I employ the form of envelope and letter as symbols of communication. The letter is the personal narrative I write to viewers. As Nam June Paik commented on video art in the neo-shamanistic context, video is a reproduction of moving images through which I seduce the viewer into believing what is happening. I position my physical body as a medium as well, and by showing the two mediums at the same time the work evokes questions about how we communicate or comprehend an artist’s given statement. It inquires into the disconnection between artist and viewer, and the artist’s anxiety of not being able to connect to the audience. There is a hope and desire to be connected to the viewers but I question whether the message can be transmitted.

Figure 52: Yiwon Park, Untold Artist Statement – The Letter That I Couldn’t Send, 2011.

Mixed media performance.

This question led to further research about visualising the emotional qualities of human connections. I began developing the video project 1.30 min Exchange/Put Yourself in

My Shoes in 2012 (fig. 53). This is a simple performance between two people. I first ask a participant to exchange shoes with me, and then ask to change back. The idea was initiated literally from the English saying ‘put yourself in my shoes’. The shoes are a metaphor for personal space, where the performance forced people to experience another person’s body heat inside the shoes. People consciously and unconsciously express their feelings through body language during the performance, and body language is an expression of the level of connection we make. It is a ritual ceremony for me to draw the invisible line of my life’s journey through the people I meet. I can share in their story through their body language. The resulting video work is a collection of short performances produced during a residency at Camac Centre D’Art in France.

Eight artists arrived at the residency centre at the same time and stayed for a month together. Eight people from different backgrounds gathered in the same place and were able to share their stories. For me the performance of sharing very personal space through shoes was another way of sharing stories. Feeling someone’s body heat inside the shoes could be weird or even unpleasant, and the chance of my shoes fitting your feet is quite low. Nonetheless it is a metaphorical gesture of the moment we meet new people and get to know them.

Figure 53: Yiwon Park, 1.30 min Exchange / Put Yourself In My Shoes, 2012. Single channel video,

1.30 min.

I then had the chance to enact the performance 1.30 min Exchange/Put Yourself in My

Shoes at Firstdraft gallery in 2013, where I developed the work in a more participatory way In this interactive performance I ask participants to swap shoes with the me inside a partition. They can return my shoes or choose to leave the partition still wearing my shoes or someone else’s. The next person will then wear the previous person’s shoes. In the end, people get to meet each other as they search for their own shoes during the exhibition. Shoes become a symbol of personal space that contain human warmth. They are an interface to share a moment of meeting, and a moment of experiencing a stranger’s body heat. I tried to bring the feeling of insecurity and the absurdity into experience in the performance. And in this way I search for the temperature of humanity and the invisible connections between us. I certainly think telling and listening to the story brings that connection.

Through this performance I intended to evoke the perception of personal space in different cultures by staging interactions. I encourage people to come into my space, which is designed for them to share their personal space and bring about a moment of discomfort and the absurd. This derives from my personal experience where cultural differences have brought about confusion and feelings of insecurity. This is the same mechanism through which I invite the viewer to the illogical imagery of my drawings, paintings and sculptures.

Notions of personal space in Australia and Korea are quite different. I find there is interesting conflict in the way people react to personal space. Australians are much more conscious than Koreans of other people’s personal space. They try not to get too close to other people, which would cause them discomfort in the public sphere. So when

I acted less conscious of others’ personal space in public, people would tell me that they are uncomfortable. Moments like this unfamiliarity with cultural convention fostered my development of this performance.

Shoes symbolise personal space and the interface of cultural difference. In Korea we take our shoes off to enter someone’s home. I felt invaded when my Australian building manager walked into my apartment with his shoes on. These differences in personal space relate to anthropological context, they are developed through different living conditions and different cultures. People in Korea remove their shoes because of the sitting living style developed there. People are less conscious of personal space in public because in a high density population they are used to being close to others. Like the other stories I have explored, from the symbolism of rabbits to E.T., in this performance shoes kick-start the unknown familiar story of us. I draw various symbolic images to tell

my story of unknown familiar feeling, and I try to transmit these feelings I have experienced to the participants.

Chapter 4: Conclusion

This project has explored different ways of visualising feelings through personal symbols in various art forms: drawing, painting, sculpture and performance. My personal feelings of insecurity were explored through this experimentation process, and in doing so I have addressed themes of absurdity and differing perspectives of fear that arise from the uncertainties of being an artist and confronting otherness.

I have discussed the interwoven relationship between personal narratives and the collective unconscious by reviewing case studies that interrogate a combination of artists’ works and their varying attitudes toward symbolism. The case studies focused on analysing feelings of insecurity such as fear, pain, instinctive anxiety, and distress concerning the uncertainty of life, examining these as a common thread in the visual narrative. I have scrutinised the feeling of insecurity as the psychological motivation of my own personal narrative, in order to understand material, mental and virtual realms of reality.

The theoretical framework of the uncanny and the archetype has affected my studio practice. This knowledge stimulated the relationships between my work, the world and myself. I approached the uncanny as a psychological experience that appears from feelings of disorientation. In analysing my feeling of unfamiliarity, I developed further understanding of visual symbols in broader cultural, historical and archetypal contexts, which brought richer and more dynamic forms and colours to my painting and drawing by playing with symbols and metaphors. My use of metaphoric tales resulted in a multi-

disciplinary studio practice that explored the archetypal meaning of my personal symbols. The fused feeling from disoriented identity was expressed as hybrid figures and mindscapes with cluttered of metaphoric images.

I looked at the cultural influences in my personal narrative and its relationship to social myths. This enhanced my studio practice and its development of my aesthetic, the unknown familiar story of us.

Importantly, the ritualistic context of my practice emerged in the process of narrating my story. I consider myself as a conduit, where the painting and drawing became virtual spaces to express the feeling of insecurity. I incorporated various media in drawing my story. I integrated my life experience into different forms of art by creating interactive connections between different media. I started by drawing symbols in small intimate sizes, and then moved into other media such as painting and sculpture, video and performance, through which my narratives flows through. In my performances, I try to bring a ritualistic context, as performance is not just telling a story but creating a story though interactions with participants.

This mechanism certainly activated my unconscious effectively and fostered intuitive connections in subjective image making. As a result of this research, I will evolve my personal mythologies – related to Beuys’ and Paik’s neoshamanism – in my practice.

This is the beginning of the next chapter in my practice. What I ultimately seek is emotive empathy, which implies emotional strength responding to the insecurity of uncertainty.

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