CREATION CONTINUA – Park Joon Photo Portraits Korean Artist Diaspora, Greater New York, April 9-14, 2024
Exhibition from April 9-14, 2024
Exhibition Hours: 12-6pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, April 13, 2024 from 5-8 pm
HEE SUNG CHO
CURATOR
KOREAN CULTURAL CENTER NEW YORK
A New York-based diaspora artist himself, Park Joon felt the need to archive lives and footprints of Korean American artists in New York, a pivotal center of the art world, and started this meaningful project to make photographic records of their histories in his own way. This project is unique in that Park photographed artists in their homes or studios, instead of his photo studio, in order to capture their most natural and genuine selves. Park also photographed them against a portable backdrop to focus only on the figures, leaving age, sex, and career out of consideration. In a way, CREATION CONTINUA: Park Joon Photo Portraits of Korean Artist Diaspora in Greater New York is a record of rare times when artists exist in another artist’s work while distanced from their own works, and is noteworthy for its establishment of Korean American artists’ history.
FROM THE ORIGINAL TEXT, CREATION CONTINUA…..
INHEE IRIS MOON
INDEPENDENT CURATOR
DIRECTOR OF FAZI
The title of this exhibition CREATION CONTINUA is the English translation of its original Latin term Creatio Continua, meaning “to express the idea that the created world is dependent at each moment in its temporal existence on the active presence of God (the creator) for its maintenance and subsistence. The term interprets the conservation and at the same time shifts it in the closest conceivable proximity of the concept of initial creation.” “For God, creation and maintenance are one and the same thing.” (Luther) (Link, C, Creatio Continua, in Religion past and present. Consulted online Feb.19th 2021. first published online; 2011, first printed edition: ISBN 978900414666, 2006-2013). The term is borrowed so that we can view the creative artistic practice of Park Joon and all the migrant Korean artist subjects in his portraits who all exemplify this creative philosophy. They are Simultaneously the creator, the created and creative, even in the era of COVID-19, which can be likened to its own wilderness or desert-like place of isolation where ordinary activities have been banned and contact between people has diminished to the form of online meetings. Our current situation is like the desert itself in many ways. Yet the need and desire to create continues regardless of our immediate hardship. Artistic creativity becomes the wellspring from which we project our hope to see the construction of new norms, and through which Joon has reformulated and reconstructed himself through his personal practice as well as the images of his friends, with whom he shares the same root, fruits of life and work as Korean artist diaspora in Greater New York.
FROM THE ORIGINAL TEXT, CREATION CONTINUA…..
