Equilibrium in Motion: Kejoo Park’s Conceptual Oasis

Curated by Irene Gong, Echoes of Time at Space776 marks the inaugural US solo exhibition of Kejoo Park, whose introspection and hybrid vision of cultural history are communicated via the formal language of abstract expressionism. Layers of semi-transparent paint form hazy surfaces and bleed downwards with gravity’s pull. Stormy, turbulent, fluid, and gestural, these greige and earth-toned mixed media works are rendered with rapid brushwork that overlays images of urban and natural vistas.

Born in South Korea and trained in the US, Kejoo Park now lives and works between Frankfurt and New York. While her commercial practice as a landscape architect and urban designer has gained acclaim in Germany and Switzerland, Park is also deeply engaged in public art discourses, site-specific installations, sculpture, and painting, among other art forms. According to curator Irene Gong, what makes the multimedia artist’s work so arresting is the synthesis of philosophical traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism, as well as Western Romanticism, coupled with her soulful navigation of the liminal space between nature and the viewer’s psyche.

In her exploration of the human condition, Park hearkens back to the legacy of Joseph Beuys, who was among the founding members of Germany’s Green Party. In the 1970s, Beuys crafted the “social sculpture” theory to highlight the communal and political nature of art as not only something that exists in society, but also something that is society. For the seventh edition of Kassel’s Documenta, Beuys conceived 7000 Oaks in 1982, which consisted of the planting of 7000 trees with a basalt stone next to each. After Beuys’ death, the public art project was expanded overseas to 22nd Street, in Chelsea, Manhattan. Beuys told Richard Demarco: “I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heart wood. It has always been a form of sculpture.”

Drawn to this art historical hallmark, Park created site-specific installations that included stones encaged in wooden frames that hang from the gallery ceiling. Suspended in a state of serenity and austerity, these sculptures transform Beuys’ ambitious project into reliquaries – intimate, quiet, and immediate. In the Homage to Beuys series, monolithic rock-like figures wander around on the pavements, and the trees planted on the curb are visible behind these shadowy figures. The familiar cityscape is imbued with a haunted sense of mysticism, psychological solitude, and time-ambiguity. The art historical nod is made even more explicit in Homage to Beuys 3 (2024), in which Beuys’ signature felt hat floats in the upper left corner.

The exhibition also includes three works from Park’s Das Lied von der Erde series, which translates to “The Song of the Earth” and is named after Gustav Mahler’s 1908–09 song cycle bearing the same title. Each canvas is divided in half down the middle, perhaps to echo the artist’s fascination with philosophical binaries that oppose and complement each other – human vs. nature, independent vs. interdependent, living vs. still. Rhythmic and aquatic, the pieces in this series evoke Monet’s water lilies with an emotional twist. The gusty lines that resemble the marks of ink wash painting reflect the toiling sorrows that characterize Mahler’s music, which was conceived after the loss of his eldest daughter, a heart defect diagnosis, and the antisemitic political persecution that forced him to resign from the Vienna Court Opera. Park, drawn to the affective intensity of the Austrian composer’s work and similarly overcome by Chinese poet Li Bai’s Taoism and wandering Romanticism, creates these works as the ultimate ode to ut pictura poesis, communicating a sense of balance and fusion.

After the show closes Gong will continue to work with Park, through her newly founded company PPULI PROJECT. Gong is endorsed by several prominent figures in the art world, including Pepe Karmel who teaches at NYU.  “Having seen Kejoo Park’s work at Irene Gong’s New York exhibition, I encountered a major artist ready to be discovered in the U.S. I am thrilled to hear about The Earth Project, which will introduce Park’s site-specific installations to four cities around the world,” he commented. Throughout 2025, Gong will through PPULI PROJECT produce and curate Park’s The Earth Project. 

In the meantime, at the intersection of Eastern and Western cultural histories, Park identifies a space of endless possibilities using nature as her language. Wandering through stones, water, lakes, and trees, I lose myself in a song of both permanence and transience in Echoes in Time.

Kejoo Park: Echoes in Time is on view at Space776 New York from July 26 to August 28, 2024. The exhibition is curated by Irene Gong.

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