Korean artist Park Myung-Hee uses traditional lacquer paint technique for her artworks that express movement of small lives that surround us but remain invisible. She chats with Divya Kaushik
This is all about energy space and structures. The Korean artist Park Myung-Hee uses interesting shapes and colours to define the universe and energy that surrounds us. She works with Korean traditional lacquer painting or Ottchil on wood to make sculptures and paintings that express movement of small lives that are not visible to the naked eye.
Park has displayed her works for the first time in India, at Korean Cultural Centre, with the objective of introducing people here to traditional Korean art practices. Ottchil being one of them. Ott tree grows in Korea, China, Japan and mainly in Southeast Asia as a special product of the Orient. Ottchil is extracted from Ott trees, which is a thick liquid of grayish white colour that changes to brown when exposed to air. “Ottchil is the pure paint that we get from nature and it has a lot of excellent characteristics like lending any material a rich gloss. Once Ottchil is dried, its gloss is peculiarly beautiful. And dried Ottchil is water-resistant, durable and is known to be both a disinfectant and antioxidant. It can be used as paint for metal or woodwork and for industrial art objects. Varnishing with lacquer, natural paint from lacquer tree, is assumed to be used since the last seven thousand years. Korean lacquer varnishing was used with the technique called Pyeong Tal in United Shila period and lacquerware, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was popular during the time of Goryeo dynasty. lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl continued as a Korean practice and I have used the same in my works as it helps add a certain pattern and gloss to my works, which is very much needed for the theme,” she explains.
Park uses this traditional method to create layers and patterns in her artworks. These layers and patterns define the life or energy that is around us but cannot be seen. “The energy of life is reflected in my Ottchil works,” she adds. Park tells us that right from her childhood she was fascinated with constellation and space. “When I was in elementary school, after having dinner I would search for constellations while sitting in the backyard. While I gazed continuously at the dark space, I wondered, ‘What would be the size of the universeIJ’ I used to get disappointed when I realised that I had no answer to this. While running at high speed to take a train in a dark tunnel, I would think, ‘Where would I be going nowIJ Which coordinates of time and space would I be moving onIJ And why should I moveIJ’ My eyes looked for a visible world but my heart always remained in the invisible world. While learning about Bionics in my middle school I found the way to look for answers to questions about my existence — I learnt about the movement of small unit cells in the microscopic world. I thought that the existence, called me, too, consists of such cells. More questions came to me then. like, ‘When did life, a biological term, begin fromIJ’ ‘How was the first gender madeIJ’ ‘Why are there only two kinds — the male and femaleIJ’ Such questions kept troubling me while I dealt with the realities of the grown up world. My body started to wear out and I was looking for an escape route. I was looking for the quiet world where thoughts, emotions, information disappeared. While reading the book A New Earth by a German author Ekhart Tolle, I got to know that ‘a state of deep bliss doesn’t exist anywhere else but within us.’ Many changes occurred in my life after that day. Whenever I felt restless, I would close my eyes and sit. I felt a strange happiness while just breathing. I wanted to share this happiness and joy and, therefore, I painted. So you would notice that my works always try to explain what has been going on in my mind,” she explains.
The artist uses bright colours in her works to strongly convey that they are about some strength that can be felt only if we allow us feel it. After receiving accolades for her work from the art fraternity here, Park hopes that soon she would interact with Indian artists and collaborate with them.