I have had the honor of corresponding with the abstract artist Sarah Park over the last couple of months. Her work is fascinating and beautiful; it contains captivating depths. To my delight Sarah was willing to discuss her art and her life with me. I am excited to share some of her recent art and words with you. I get lost in her work and I hope you can take some time to do the same.
2013 Light and Dark 40cm x 60cm oil on canvas
No.10 Confession Mixed media on canvas 73 x 53 cm 2020
SP:
Before getting into the interview, I will introduce myself. I am from South Korea and I have lived in Shanghai China for 24 years. My works are abstract paintings, and most of the exhibitions took place in Shanghai. Now, I live in Korea and my work studio is here as well. The reason I paint: God seems to have covered me with some kind of furoshiki, and I think he wants me to live with that furoshiki. No life brings me down deep inside my existence other than being an artist. If I had not become a painter, I think I would have been a musician, dancer, or a poet to live a life as an artist. To me, my work is the process of discovering me and digging each of the numerous treasures that God has hidden inside me. Digging into oneself is not a simple job. This is because there is no sign or a guide, such as a lighthouse. The sense of accomplishment when discovering an island while sailing towards an ambiguous and unknown island is truly astonishing. Those things keep me going as an artist. I wish I could paint until my last light of life remains, then disappear.
I hate to even imagine humanity and the world without art. Art is a powerful tool to reveal that all human beings are fundamentally divine. I love art. Love cannot be explained by logic. It is clear that I will live blind to love because of art all my life.
Confession Mixed media on canvas 73x53cm 2020
2020 20cm x 30cm mix media on wood (4)
CR:
Can you tell me how you got started painting? What is your artistic background?
SP:
Art is the person’s scent. It’s a reflection of that person and a mirror of the soul. I was born and lived in the mountains until I was nine. It is a place called Cheongdo, where the water is clear and the mountain birds are beautiful. In the daytime, there were many pheasants and magpies around, and at night the sound of owls calmed the village. Back then, there was no electricity so we lit lanterns. The night sky was filled with stars and I grew up watching shooting stars falling over the sky. The beautiful scenery would hold me for hours. I feel like those environmental factors have made me more sensitive and emotional. In middle school, there were many times when I was mesmerized by my emotions. My parents were against me going to an art university due to family circumstances, but I eventually majored in fine painting at an art university. I was able to study in the school mostly with my scholarship. Since college, I enjoyed listening to classical music and reading books. I once fell in love with Indian philosophy. I think it was popular all over the world at that time. Students demonstrated against dictatorship to win democracy, and I think I spent almost a year reading socialist books and participating in demonstrations. In socialism, however, I wandered for a long time because I knew that art only serves as a tool for the system and that personal ideas would not be accepted, so I searched for ways to express myself. After graduating from college, I worked as a jewelry designer for a while to earn a living, and I quit because the job wasn’t for me. Then, with my friend’s help, I was able to work solely on my paintings. After traveling to India for two months, we agonized over the fundamental problems of life, such as where we came from and where we were heading. After a year of work, I had my first exhibition. The theme was something like night wandering and resurrection. I decided to travel again after finishing the exhibition and since I was born as an Asian, I wanted to go to China, where the Asian culture is rooted from. I traveled all over China by boat for another two months. It was in 1994, shortly after China was opened to the West.
I wanted to live abroad because I thought it was frustrating for me to live in Korea, where the land was small and there were many ideas that represented male supremacy, so I traveled from places to places such as Beijing, Tsuwanseong, and Xi'anhang Zhou in China. At last, I was in Shanghai. There, I happened to meet a Korean student studying in China at the end of my trip. That became a connection and after I returned to Korea, I went back to Shanghai to study Chinese for a short period of time, and he and I eventually got married and we decided to live in China. I had three children, and when they were still young, I learned Chinese painting from a Shanghai professor for three years. He also participated in the art fair by painting in between. Then, when the youngest was less than two years old, my husband died in the late stage of liver cancer.
After his death, I had to run his company, so I had to stop painting for about five years.
Whenever I started painting again with passion, I had to work and paint at the same time. After 10 years, I stopped with my business and now I solely work on my paintings.
2020 20cm x 30cm mix media on wood
04 2013 80cmx100cm mix media dark and light
CR:
Sarah, thank you so much for telling me who you are. This is a lovely experience. When you paint, what is your method?
SP:
When I was in Shanghai, I usually worked on oil painting on canvas for a long time, but in Korea, now I work with various materials. For example, I draw with ink or charcoal on a wooden board. I've also been trying a lot of collage works since last year. I also fold or tear Korean paper and sew it up, color it with acrylic paint on the newspaper, and fold several layers as a collage. I layer the base and then add it with fibers like mesh cloth. Colors and lines take great part in my works, and sewing or folded papers are used as lines.
No.4 Confession Mixed media on paper 108 x 76 cm 2020
2017 Light and Dark 80cmx100cm oil on canvas
2020 20cm x 30cm Mixed media on wood
CR:
How has your art changed since you first started? What are some things you have learned along the way about the creative process?
SP:
I learned painting since high school, mainly a westernized approach. I practiced a lot of basic skills such as perspective and contrast from the Impressionist painting style of western classicalism, and tried to learn Cezanne, Rembrandt, and Rouault’s approach. After graduating from college, I did a lot of abstract expressionist works. Then I learned Chinese painting for three years, where I adapted oriental techniques in my painting. For about ten years, I focused on concentration of blurred ink and lines in my oil paintings. The colors that I grew up watching a lot in my childhood seem to flow in my works naturally, and make them look like Korean painting. I also like color harmony and lines used in calligraphy.
In summary, if it was a Western approach at the beginning, later I began to look at objects with more oriental eyes and express them with oriental techniques.
2020 20cmx30cm mix media on wood
No.6 Confession Mixed media on rice paper 67 x 55 cm 2020
2020 20cm x 30cm mix media on wood (3)
CR:
Could you talk about your spirituality and it's connection to your work?
SP:
I think a lot about life and death, but the world is much more invisible than the world I see, and there are more things that I do not know than the things that I know.
I am Christian, and my paintings serve as a device of conversation with God as well. Sometimes my titles and themes of work are inspired from the words in the Great Bible. There was a time where I used a lot of horizontal and vertical lines. The vertical lines represented my love to God and the horizontal represented my love to neighbor and my relationships with others. The screen of the painting is just like a mirror of life, and the expressions are my spirit’s language.
The time I seek for myself and ask questions like where the existence of human beings comes from are my working time. Emotions from my past experiences or memories, such as sadness or joy also affect my work unconsciously. My emotions also deepen in parts where colors get stronger and tremors of lines. Works that involve sewing sometimes are like sewing gaps after parting or wounds, and the time when I can heal. The ambiguity at the beginning of painting gradually becomes a sort of depiction, and born as a certain being at last.
2020 20cm x 30cm Mix media on wood (2)
No.8 Confession Mixed media on rice paper 92 x 62 cm 2020
CR:
Can you tell me about your workspace?
SP:
I have two studios, one in Johor Bahru Malaysia, and one in Seoul Korea.
The studio in Malaysia has a high ceiling and is spacious. The studio in Korea is in a construction area, and it also has a high ceiling and is spacious. It is offered for free for a year.
Workspace.
Sarah Park’s workspace.
Workspace.
05 2019 Revelation 150cmx150cm mix media on canvas
No.5 Confession Mixed media on rice paper 88 x 65 cm 2020
CR:
What does the process of creating a piece look like for you these days? What do you do to prepare, what do you do to get in a meditative head space, how do you bring forth the emotions and memories that you bring into your work? How do you step into the act of creation?
SP:
As soon as I arrive at my studio, I turn on classic music. Then, I drink a cup of coffee and read or memorize bible verses. Music plays a great role in my work. It makes me sentimental and guides me like a lighthouse in the dark. Then, I take my time to carefully observe my works. I work several pieces simultaneously, and I decide on what to fix and how to finish an art work. I usually arrive at my studio around 8 a.m. in the morning, and start painting from 9 a.m. The process is not always the same everyday but most of the time I spend my morning fixing works from the last day and warm up by painting the base or sewing fabric or Korean paper for objet. From 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., I do most of my work that needs drawing and painting since this period of time is when I concentrate the most and my body warmed up. I like to spend about an hour drawing on a piece of paper or wood every single day because it makes me flexible in big drawings and color arrangements or compositions. After my work time, I walk at least an hour along the sea or in the woods looking at the colors and shapes of water changing. This time of the day is much valuable to me as much as my working time. From time to time, I travel to places or stay in the countryside and work on my drawings as well.
2019 80 x 36cm Mixed media on rice paper Confession
Confession Mixed media on rice paper 92 x 62cm 2019
No.2 Confession Mixed media on paper 108 x 76 cm 2020
CR:
Some people believe that every time we revisit a memory or retell a story, it changes subtly. Do you think this might be so? As an artist who works with memory, is one of your intents to heal and honor the past? Is art a way of catching memories and feelings so that they might not be forgotten?
SP:
I do believe that occasionally, memories of events fade over time and become transformed. After a time of pain, the pain becomes lighter as time passes. Although I do not start my work by grasping the memories of the past but when I work, it seems that images from my memories affect the work unconsciously. When I look at breathtaking sceneries of nature, the beautiful emotions I get from them seem to be stored in a warehouse of memory, and in this warehouse, there are also violent emotions, sadness, joy, and loneliness. When I work, the emotional state at the time of work seems to reveal and amplify the remembered emotions. I can't say that I work in order to heal, but I definitely think that forgiveness and acceptance of love for human beings are present in the process of painting. Healing of myself is there as well. While I’m painting, the ideal world unfolds and seems to connect to parted ones. Death is accepted as a continuation of life. Painting is the total act of my existence to me. I wish my work could touch someone's heart and heal them.
2019 90 x 35cm Mixed media on rice paper Confession
No.3 Confession Mixed media on paper 110 x 78 cm 2020
No.7 Confession Mixed media on paper 100 x 75 cm 2020
I have made the deliberate decision not to share my interpretation of Park’s art or her words, for fear of disrupting your own relationship with them. I would like to express my thanks for her participation in this interview. It has been an amazing experience. Her work is inspiring; not just the end results but also having had a glimpse into her processes and methods of creation and living.
Follow her and find out more about Sarah Park and her recent work on Instagram @artist_sarah_park
You can also reach her by email: sara091509@gmail.com
Thanks for reading!