Spiritual Garden: Hyojin Park

South Korean artist Hyojin Park’s 'Spiritual Garden' series is defined by multiple tensions.

Borrowing from the still life tradition, she begins each work by arranging flowers and foliage in antique porcelain and bronze vessels in her studio.

The stillness of these sculptural displays is then disturbed, as Park throws high-pigment acrylic paint over their surface. Fluid, dripping colour, almost abstract expressionist in its application, contrasts with the placidity of the blooms and their context – the historical connotations of the still life genre and our expectations of finish and tone.  

Park continues to challenge the viewer’s assumptions by photographing each paint-splattered vessel, once more displacing the genre’s meditative element with a more immediate, contemporary practice. On closer inspection of each crisp, final image, the flowers are revealed to be fabric, their synthetic, woven texture juxtaposed with the high gloss of the paint that runs down them and the vases in which they are gathered. Once more, transience is met with indestructibility, stasis with motion.

The exhibition, held in conjunction with Grey Skipwith, features twelve pigment print photographs with accompanying sculpture. Her first exhibition at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Park has exhibited extensively in Asia and the UK.