A Part of a Part
Lee Seonyoung (Art Critic)
Park Sohhyun's works featured in the exhibition, saturated with mottled imagery, had their origins in photography. From the landscapes photographed during her travels—where vivid blue skies stand in stark contrast to red earth—Park extracts small portions, much like taking samples. These fragments are then repeatedly magnified on a computer screen, carefully selected, and ultimately rendered as gouache drawings on paper. Though the image appears to be an enlarged depiction of dust or fine sand, with particles loosely overlapping one another, it is actually based on red sandstone. After all, sandstone, when broken down, would become dust or sand. For an earlier show, she cut out a section of the blue sky from the same photograph and, following the same process, created images that resembled cell division. From a wide range of landscapes, she picks out one portion, then narrows her focus further through repeated magnification—until the initial image is no longer visible. “A part of a part” excludes the whole, offering viewers no visual anchor. In the images that contain “a part of a part”, she leaves blank spaces along the vertical and horizontal axes, implying that these fragments have broken away from some larger, unseen whole.
Because Park never reveals the whole, the work remains open and endlessly variable. The overlapping images, like translucent flakes of bark, resemble the empty space between a nucleus and its electrons; it may appear illusory, but it is nonetheless an essential part of reality. In some cases, the pieces are mounted in high-quality walnut frames paired with clear acrylic, strengthening their vulnerability as partial forms. Measuring 18 by 12.5 centimeters, the works complement the distinctive hue of the wooden frame. The highlight of the exhibition is a series of twelve works, each measuring 100 by 70 centimeters, installed in frames with built-in magnets. Whether placed in frames or mounted directly on the wall, the works form a series of drawings on uniformly sized paper, which are composed in subtly related tones. From a childhood photograph, she enlarged a section until the pixels became visible, paying close attention to the subtle shifts in shape and texture. While the pixel units are square, she approaches them as lines within her visual interpretation. The process of enlarging a photograph has the effect of breaking a clear subject into smaller fragments. As the viewer examines the image in greater detail, its clarity diminishes. For her, seeing something closely or from afar becomes a way of reflecting on one’s stance toward life. We tend to overlook what lies closest to us, while speaking with certainty about what lies in the distance.
Such “certainty” turns into dogma, becomes a cliché, and eventually forms what we call common sense. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, his writing on photography and art, distinguishes between “studium and punctum”—a distinction that reflects his desire to avoid a certain kind of certainty in genuine art, which, for him, was simply another name for common sense. Much like positivism, common sense is grounded in a belief in the solidity of reality and has little regard for things characterized by uncertainty—especially art. Certainty and uncertainty did not exist from the beginning; rather, what began as mere accidents eventually solidified into boundaries. We come to understand the emptiness of the countless lines society has drawn—only to find ourselves already stepping off the stage of life. A new generation inevitably comes face to face with those boundaries once again. If culture is governed by prescribed codes, then art is what breaks free from them. Her series unfolds as nothing less than a great ocean of uncertainty. At times, she presents works that allow viewers to piece together the full scene. Yet in A Part of a Part exhibition, the context that might gain clarity at a distance is intentionally left out.
The subtitle of this exhibition was inspired by physicist Werner Heisenberg’s The Part and the Whole, which asserts that the whole cannot be understood through its parts, nor can one choose between part and whole. In The Part and the Whole, the classical worldview is presented in relative terms: scientific truth is seen as total and attainable through the interdependent relationship of part and whole. In short, truth is “indeterminate.” While Heisenberg’s theory invites multiple interpretations, Park understands what was once considered a solid foundation of truth to have given way to the realm of statistical probability. She remains untroubled in the face of a truth accessible only in parts. Apart from the exhibited pieces, the larger body of work becomes a field where she delights in the diversity gained by letting go of any singular truth. Clearly, Heisenberg was not advocating an agnosticism that lapses into blind belief. The statistical truth, as if the Creator were casting dice, rejects dogma born of conviction and opens up a more humble, and thus more precise, way of understanding reality.
Park simply selects portions from her own photographs through repeated magnification, without introducing any elements of imagination. The arrangement of parts is in itself fantastical. Thin brown-toned layers, thought to be connected to the earth, overlap in places and form shapes that vary subtly in tones and densities from one section to another. This first landscape, dismantling the typical representation of a famous tourist destination, is a world away from the countless snapshots that crowd social media. The image discloses nothing about who was present, when it was taken, or where it was shot. Her work captures, on a microscopic scale, the feeling of the red sandstone that once stood in stark contrast to the blue sky of Vietnam. She expands a space no larger than a handspan into something infinite. The area is not entirely random, yet neither is it guided by any clear logic or necessity. Her recent works began with a discovery she made in 2019 while digitally compositing her own drawings. When she magnified the black ink of her drawings, unexpected colors emerged.
It reminds us that black itself is a mixture of all colors, simultaneously revealing the unconscious in the very process of making the unseen visible. As she pieced together 140 spontaneous ink drawings in Photoshop—each drawn without a plan, simply by following the movement of her hand—a landscape of the unconscious gradually emerged. As the Surrealists once experimented, creating unpredictable images by continuing without knowing what had come before reveals a truth deeper than what is visibly certain. Although each drawing—dense and meticulous—takes about two days to complete on a sheet 1.5 times the size of A4, and thus cannot be described as Surrealist “automatism” in the strict sense, the unpredictability of the outcome remains similar. This is because each form continues without knowledge of the one before it, making it closer to the unconscious than to conscious intention. Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, noted that the visual unconscious can be discovered through media such as photography and film. She resists engaging with the notion of the whole, believing it to be already tainted by prejudice.
In the enlarged landscape images, minute elements are brought into view, and their variations continue without end. There is no single truth; rather, there are many. While observing her photographs and drawings at the pixel level, Park came to realize that “there were many similar colors but rarely any that were truly identical”—this realization became a source of inspiration for her work. The expression “an image breaks” is often used in everyday language, but for her, it signals the collapse of prejudice. In her 2021 exhibition Similar Things, Park explored how sameness differs from similarity. In that project, she limited her pencil work to roughly three kinds of lines to construct the image. She refers to her habitual strokes as “meticulously layered lines, single marks like cut edges, and rough, scribbled traces.” Speaking of the works composed by layering these three kinds of strokes, she observes, “Each image may look similar at first, given that they’re built from repeated, restricted lines. But in reality, they are all different. Every element—from composition and the density of the pencil to the thickness, direction, and layering of lines—differs.” She emphasizes this difference.
In interpreting René Magritte’s work, which breaks with representational conventions, Michel Foucault points out that resemblance, unlike identity that relies on the certainty of a referent, continues in an open-ended sequence. Even in science, the belief in accurate representation has broken down. Modern quantum mechanics, with its probabilistic worldview, shattered the deterministic paradigm of classical science. In Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, Philip Ball explains that strict determinists like Hobbes viewed the universe as a clockwork mechanism. In his view, the universe could only be understood by fragmenting it into discrete pieces and subjecting them to scientific reductionism. By reducing society to its individual components, Hobbes attempted to identify straightforward causal forces behind their movements. In this view, human beings were merely passive puppets, moved by external forces operating in the world.
As Philip Ball notes, statisticians pointed out that their data reflected not just past events, but also the likelihood of events happening in the present. What she explores is not the realm of “certain statistics achieved through proper counting,” but “the probabilistic world that engages with what cannot be known” (Philip Ball). The focus is not on reproducing observable, empirical reality, but on acknowledging the share that belongs to the unknown. According to Philip Ball, the epistemological framework she references—rooted in quantum mechanics—“collapsed the deterministic world of Newtonian mechanics by placing probability at the core of the question.” As Philip Ball explains, quantum mechanics suggests that there are things not only unknown to us, but fundamentally unknowable. What she delves into is not fixed law, but the idea of probability, as emphasized in modern physics. This reflects the same logic behind her focus on resemblance rather than identity. Park states that “her practice explores the difference between seeing and perceiving, ultimately focusing on the point where existing biases are either restructured or dismantled.”