“My Neck Pillow” (2024), 10 x 14”, color pencil drawing
Still lifes, portraits, doodles — this mark-making often defines a singular moment in time and space. In SunYoung Park’s colored pencil drawings there are no such boundaries because her subjects exist in a neutral and empty zone. While the drawings are typically preparation for her sculptures, the Kansas City artist’s aim in her recent drawings is to create discrete, individualized images. “I am more focused on incorporating more gestures and tension in the drawing, which would suggest some ambiguous narrative,” writes Park.
With no fixed story to follow, we are free to surrender to the mystery, where disparate ideas collide.
These drawings may be distant kin to still lifes or shapeshifter portraiture. They communicate wild imaginings about bodies, human or otherwise, biomorphism, and more. Park notes that drawing “is my collage of thoughts, emotions, memories, and random images. I organize my thoughts by gathering them all in the drawing, putting some humor and irony between the elements.”
Park also amplifies touch in her work — pencil point to paper, abstracted fingers, and the emotional touchstones that the imagery may evoke. “My Neck Pillow” and “Sharpen Dripping” incorporate plant fronds, tied to or intimately wound around pink fingerlike figures. The plant life is an extension of her interest in cryptic relationships between seemingly unrelated things and ideas.
In “Was Shining Brightly,” a folded blanket-like shape is propped up by fingery ribbons of red and tied up with a bow. Whimsical yet stately, the subject echoes her sculptures, seen last year in the 2023 Charlotte Street Fellows exhibition at the Nerman Museum, yet the act of drawing grants the figure natural fluidity and animated generosity. The composition is energized by the upward trajectory of the primary figure, shored up and tended to by delicate fingers.
“The Thing on the Rock Looking Through Itself” shares this corporeal elegance, appearing as a delicate amorphous being, similar to and perhaps in silent covenant with the perching object in “Sitting on the Island Table.”
Park’s subjects/things/objects often feel like they’re mutating or have just shifted their weight. They blob, ooze, or flow, as in the case of “The Flowing Mountain,” which emerges from behind a red tiled roof. The roof’s stasis creates dynamic tension with the mountain and anchors the mountain’s energy, preventing it from sliding off the paper into our laps.
There is something heroic about these odd figures Park draws, which are separate, but never aloof from her sculptures. Renouncing ordinary time and reality, they live on center stage on their rocks and tables, and they engage with their co-stars — the ribbons, fingers, plants — in surprisingly elegant, tender, and ultimately, inscrutable ways.
For more information, visit park-sunyoung.com.
All images courtesy of the artist
