Poster image of Wunggyu Park’s solo exhibition "Dummy Buddha" at Art Space Boan 1, Seoul. Organized by the Seoul Museum of Art (October 30, 2022 – November 20, 2022). © Namiad.Selected as one of the Seoul Museum of Art’s 2022 SeMA Emerging Artists & Curators Program, the exhibition “Dummy Buddha” presents the works of Wunggyu Park (b. 1987) on the first and second floors of Boan 1942.
Instead of depicting divine deities, Park paints grotesque and horrifying beings that flaunt their existence in his paintings. Majoring in Oriental painting, Park borrows techniques from traditional Korean and Japanese Buddhist paintings to depict objects that evoke repulsive feelings, such as insect-like bizarre creatures.
Using Buddhist painting, the artist intends to capture and convey “negativity.” Park brings together the elements of traditional Buddhist paintings that inspired him and reconstructs them in six formative perspectives (imitation, composition, form, texture, transformation, and application). Twelve groups of works are arranged to be organically connected to the twelve exhibition spaces.
Wunggyu Park has held solo exhibitions at Onground 2 (Seoul, 2018), Art Space Kneet (Seoul, 2017), and Cheongju Creative Art Studio (Cheongju, 2016). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Project Gallery at the Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2022), Danwon Art Museum (Ansan, 2021), Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2021), and Outsight (Seoul, 2019).
