Park Soo Hwan, praise of rhythm

The history of the relationship between music and visual arts is more or less long from the point of view people take. In terms of modernity, is remembered as the beginning of the twentieth century as it sought to reveal the authority of the topic, Vasily Kandinsky model was built in music as he wanted to be a form of art totally independent of any reference to reality. “For the creative artists who want to and have to express their inner world, imitation of the things of the nature, no matter how successful it may be, can not be a goal in itself,” he wrote in his monumental book published in 1911, the Spiritual in Art. He adds, “and the creative artists pursues the ease and music, the most intangible art reaches there with the ease. We understand that they are turning to this kind of art and they seek to discover the similar processes in their own art. In painting, in consequence, the current research on rhythm, abstract or mathematical construction, and the value that today we attributed to the repetition of colored tone, the dynamics of color … “

Park Soo Hwan is neither painter nor abstractionist. He is a photographer but, most of all, he is a musician. And, for him, music is ranked as the top priority, if he should choose one. Does that mean he has taken the opposite way to what Kandinsky meant? Not at all. Both artists are in the same community of interest that adopts music as an inspirational and stimulating vehicle of artistic creation. In this regard, it is recalled that he made variations within the two series of paintings titled respectively “Improvisation” and “Composition” when he was about to make the qualitative leap that would lead to the invention of abstraction. The two words are borrowed directly from musical terms. Interestingly, the latter is familiar to Park’s art – Thomas Zoritchak spoke about Park’s photograph with the term “arrangement”, which explains everything! The former is completely foreign to him. His images were always results of careful elaboration.

If the temptation is so great to quote Kandinsky who says in Point, Line,Pllan (1926), “The composition based on harmony is an arrangement of colorful shapes and drawings which has an independent existence brought from the inner necessity … ” Once again, his words are echoed in the photographer’s mind. Indeed, the photographic art of Park is inescapably linked to his life, his experiences, and his feelings. About the city where he loves walking in all directions in search of sensation, he said it is moving as musical notes, and so even a building can beat like a drum. If he, however, finds that Paris is rather quiet, New York can be discovered only through the filter of the advertisements, and Madrid, compared to Busan, the second largest city of Korea, known to be particularly effervescent, is much more geometric. The artist can not stop himself attaching a sound to the people in the street whom he observes. Whenever he sees an old woman, a child, a young woman, a white-collar worker pass by him, he immediately finds a music from each of them as we sometimes imagine all sorts of stories about them. Park does not walk in the city for the purpose of finding any situation, he let the city come to himself. When he has a city in hand – i.e. when he feels at home and knows where he is – then he chooses the right place, waits for the good time, and finds the right cloud, a good person, a good image. And finally he takes an action. He takes a lot of photos, being eager to capture everything that his subject can restitute with the concept of rhythm and what is buried within the deepest part of him. He is impatient to reveal his subject to the full light of future photographs.

Done at the computer, the following work similar to that of an alchemist who doses, measures, skillfully blending the ingredients he hopes to succeed in making gold. In the software he uses, Park is similar to those researchers seeking the absolute which can change the world because they have a new and unique vision and there is an irrepressible need to offer to others as an invitation to discover not only the beauty but the presence. Those that do vibrate him, the artist, like moves to the slightest touch of a string instrument, whether it is a lowest sound of a contrabass or extremely highest sound of a violin.

The Photographs of Park present something of a small graphic vibrato that draws the image of an echo here and over there as it trembles in the same matiere where his photographs are made. Though vibrated from a simple trembling, they are animated by an essential breath. In a kind of vital flow which gives the appearance of a strange epiphany. So all his three sets of images are entitled Metronome although they deal with different subjects, on which the artist has made variations over the past three years. If the first – Metronome 1, 2006 – place the photographer in a vis-à-vis with his close-up model, Park seized, however, in a moment where he listens to a song composed by him and where there echoed by moving his body. One way to exchange and dialogue by the sound whose rhythm and pace carry the image of an amazing feeling of life. Produced in New York, the Metronome 2, 2007 absent the living body to a city that offers mirror reflecting the beauty of its buildings in the monumentality of his figures aguichante pinup advertising and the electric light and color of his restless nights. On any other tempo, Metronome 3, 2008 – which is made of views taken in Saint-Malo, breathing an atmosphere past – it shows about urban views if they appear troubled breathing beat any internal nothing will never stop as long as the government Thursday of a dynamic and elusive to infinity.

If, for Park, music is inspiring, stimulating and symbolic, his approach does not deny anything poetic and it calls for an aesthetic of rhythm that gives the photography a movement to say the least ironic.