Park Yon-jae, “Return to Nature 2023-02,” 2023, print on canvas, 28″ x 16″/Photo: Park Yon-jae
When’s the last time you heard someone say they like digital painting? Its kitschy subject matter and inhuman flatness (show yourself, pesky artist!) make it an easy put-down for aesthetic purists. Park Yon-jae’s current exhibit at the Bridgeport Art Center doesn’t so much rebut this dismissiveness as render it petulantly conservative: Park possesses the sensuous coolness of someone who knows that their medium is a valid aesthetic staging ground. “Return to Nature” assembles Park’s digital artworks in a series of prints on canvas which depict the natural world through discernibly artificial motifs.
The vast majority of digital paintings come off as abiotic and uninspired due to its failure to convey the illusion of pictorial depth. Park’s pictures evade this pitfall by satisfying themselves within the limitations of planar rectilinear space. Their flatness isn’t the frustration of a desired outcome, but a constraint to the digital medium that must be respected (as Park does, a remarkable feat in our hubristic age) lest one descend into vapid absurdity.
Park Yon-jae, “Return to Nature 2023-13,” 2023, print on canvas, 28″ x 16″/Photo: Park Yon-jae
Within this limited pictorial horizon, Park brings pragmatic graphical styles (more acquainted with realms like statistics and sociology than the fine arts) in contact with the living world. Their mid-motion fish and butterflies are thrown against torrents of vertical black lines and often themselves fragmented into groups of small circles. The use of these unorthodox visual motifs to depict well-trodden subjects has a defamiliarizing effect, analogous to taking off one’s glasses in a familiar place. The world becomes blurry and unknowable, but somehow abounds with a sublime order that was previously unnoticeable yet there all along.
Or maybe it’s just the sheer volume of fish and butterflies at this show that feels like such a jolt. Try saying a word out loud twenty times. If you’re human, it’ll stop seeming like a word with a fixed referent and take on the exoticism of some extraterrestrial tongue. Whether by visual elocution or sheer repetitiveness, Park’s works seem to cry, “How did we never notice how damn beautiful these things are?”
Park Yon-jae, “Return to Nature 2023-04-01,” 2023, print on canvas, 28″ x 16″/Photo: Park Yon-jae
In the show’s more colorful works, Park eschews another of digital painting’s pitfalls—the dullness of any distinguishable “mark” resulting from the artist’s touch. The opalescent abdomens of insects and flowers are delineated in such fierce swaths of light blue and bloody orange that I was incredulous of their digital birth. Take “Butterfly V,” in which a profusion of coruscating stars enliven the canvas’ right hand side. Try to tell yourself it wasn’t a tiny brush in the hand of a hermetic genius that created these. You’ll go crazy if you think about it too hard.
But there’s the rub: this show is a return to nature that uses exclusively non-natural methods to reach its end product. What could be more paradoxical than to suggest that technology—in whose name our forests have been decimated, our glaciers melted, and our natural landscape irreversibly harmed—could create art that provides novel ways to connect with the natural world?
“Park Yon-jae: Return to Nature” was scheduled to be on view at Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 West 35th, through March 1 but is now closed due to a sudden change of schedule.
