Park exhibits in Seoul

Maria Park, assistant professor of art, presents her installation Manifest Destiny at the Seoul National University’s Museum of Art from July 1 to August 16. Park joins other past recipients of the Korean Arts Foundation of America (KAFA) award in the exhibition entitled For Excellence: 11 KAFA Awarded Artists.

Park’s installation uses images from the 2006 Lebanon War and two films — Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch — giving “human presence” the exact space allotted on the screen/image.

“I am interested in how these films demonstrate the subtle sanctioning of dehumanization through an aestheticization of violence, a mechanism often at work in media coverage of war,” says Park. “My process of painting seeks to expose the dehumanization at work within these images through a relentless rendering of edges in shards of color, embedding subject into object, figure into ground.”

The KAFA award has been given since 1992 to the winner of a biennial competition and is open to artists of Korean descent. Past recipients include Byron Kim, Do-Ho Suh, and Yunhee Min.

The opening reception is July 1 from 4 to 6 p.m.