Youngmin Park (b.1997, Seoul) is an artist based in New York and Seoul. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Korea National University of Arts.Park’s debut U.S. solo exhibition, Allegory of Fragility, was presented at Make Room Gallery in Los Angeles in 2024. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions such as Tone Check: The Skins of Contemporary Korean Painting at Eli Klein Gallery, New York; MORE THAN NOW at Moosey Gallery, London; and in media res at The Blanc Gallery, New York. Additionally, she has participated in art fairs including ART021 Shanghai with Make Room Gallery and recent NADA New York with A-Lounge Gallery.
Thank you for joining us today, Youngmin. Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Hello, my name is Youngmin. I am a painter, an avid dog lover, and a die-hard rock fan! I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to New York in 2022 for my master’s degree at Columbia University and have been working and living here since.
Your work often reveals the fragility of memory and perception through nonlinear narratives and recurring, morphing elements. How do you think these formal strategies reflect the instability of personal or collective memory?
When I talk to others about past events, I am always surprised at how we remember things differently, even though they happened together. And I would notice myself re-shaping my point of view through what I’ve learned newly from the other. For that reason, the figures in my paintings take on the persona of each other by recurring elements and morphing them into different combinations and situations. The elements I use are ones I feel that I own. Things that come naturally to me. Like (groups of) humans, dogs, and fish, which come from my upbringing, and recently, city elements like the cityscape or pigeons. Even metaphorical elements that come internally, like flies or holes.
Growing up in a multigenerational household surrounded by both humans and animals, you describe a heightened awareness of partiality and fragmented observation. How does this early experience shape the way you construct visual narratives today?
In my paintings, there’s always a sense of doubt, questioning, suspicion, and relativity, which could open the room for errors and illusions.
Making diptychs, triptychs, or even works in sets, is also to highlight the inherent limitations of our understandings and visualize the parallax of gaze. The in-between gaps suggest an infinite potential for expansion in the psychological time and space. Therefore, the connected and disconnected images also contribute to nonlinear storytelling and play a role in confusion.
What does “community” mean to you, and how do you see yourself in a community?
The way I take in the word “community” has changed a lot. During my upbringing, as my main community was my family, there was always a clear sense of power hierarchy that flowed through the household: grandparents, aunts, parents, my sister, and me. And even within the animals, which was also one way my grandfather showed off his dictatorial power in the house, there was a power hierarchy: dogs, cats, fish. And being the youngest, I sort of placed myself in between the human and animal groups, thinking of myself as the tail of the humans and the head of the animals. Because these animals were treated as possessions for the show in a way, I think I felt some kind of responsibility, like a spokesperson or mediator for their rights.
Now that I’m living in New York, my main community is the people I met in the art world. What I have learned the most is that there is nothing I can achieve by myself without the support of my art community. It is bonded with generosity, and I feel grateful for each and every one of the people around me. One of my motivations for hard work would be so that I could one day also provide the help I once received.
You often use disconnection and parallax—do you see the viewer as a storyteller, or as someone meant to stay within the ambiguity?
As much as I hope the viewers will leisurely appreciate the paintings, I also want to encourage them to complete the narratives by connecting the dots of the skewed painterly world.
Especially when working with grids or sets of works, I think about the physical space between the frames as something that disconnects and connects the images, and at the same time, suggests an infinite potential of expansion in the psychological time and space. My individual works are like a cell of a larger body or a gear as part of a machine. They grow in a nonlinear order and operate the whole in a changed manner every time accordingly.
Do you have any advice that you would offer to others?
This could be an effective one for creatives: To make something fresh, throw away the first two ideas that come to your mind because it’s likely that others would have thought of it too.
text & photo courtesy of Youngmin Park
- Website: http://youngminpark.net/
- Instagram: @_mae_ee
