Silent March for the Earth

The Korean-American painter Kejoo Park merges art, nature and action in her “Earth Project” at the Kunstverein Familie Montez. She also has Frankfurt schoolchildren participate in a “Silent March for the Earth.”

One might almost call Kejoo Park a Romantic. And not only because she paid homage a few years ago with Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and a series of large-format paintings. An homage that, like Mahler's symphonic song cycle, evokes themes in literature, song, and painting of the era such as ‘Loneliness in Autumn,‘ ‘Youth,‘ or ‘Farewell.‘ This is so, of course, without the Korean-American artist ever intending to illustrate these themes.

Park creates paintings on raw canvas using mixed techniques that, while allowing for landscape associations, are largely abstract. And yet it cannot be a coincidence that, following Das Lied von der Erde, she invokes another classically Romantic motif in her current cycle with the figure of the wanderer, representing all that concerns the painter, who was also trained in New York. Man and nature, solitude and proximity, silence and eloquence; light and dark, night and day, love and death, becoming and passing away – in short: the duality of existence inscribed in nature and the world is expressed in her painting in a manner entirely free of pathos.

Despite Park’s undeniable love for Romanticism and especially for music, poetry by Hölderlin, Rilke or Hermann Hesse, this also reflects less a flight from the world than a commitment to the present and its current upheavals. It is decisive, says the artist born in Seoul in 1956, that less the motif than an attitude towards nature, which is expressed in Romanticism as well as in the tradition of Asian and particularly Korean art. An attitude that, as a viewer of her work, one has never found more clearly articulated than in Park’s newly realized ‘Earth Project‘ at Kunstverein Familie Montez, where she surprisingly brings together the different disciplines of her work in an art context.

In addition, the artist, who studied landscape architecture, has realized numerous projects in public spaces. Here, with the central installation, inspired by image cycles such as Das Lied von der Erde and the ‘Wanderer,‘ the ‘Earth Project‘ presents a world full of contradictions, as Hölderlin saw it, and thus presents modernity as a world defined by contrasts before the eyes of the viewer. Indeed, the external and internal, nature and culture, earth and water, wind and air, and fire do not appear to be opposed in the more than nine-meter-wide circle separated by an outer wall, where painting and installation run parallel.

Rather, they find themselves quite naturally, even romantically, encompassed in a vision of unity and harmony. How viable this might be in societal practice is the subject of the two prominent events of the exhibition, including the panel discussion and the ‘Silent March for the Earth,’ which is scheduled to take place on June 26 at the Kunstverein Familie Montez in Frankfurt. Also, if one will, an image.

Christoff Schoetter