Hogar Collection Gallery is pleased to announce, “The Wet Dreamer and his Wistful Eyes”, an exhibition by Seoul Korea based artist, Jihoon Park. The exhibition runs from June 30 – July 31, 2006, opening reception for the artist will be on Saturday, July 1, 6-9 pm. In his first solo show at the gallery Park will be presenting new works based in watercolor, video and sculpture. His work explores the dichotomy of human life and the degradation of the temporal qualities that make up our existence. It celebrates in a comedic way, how our follies and our fate go hand in hand. Approaching his work with an apparent awareness of history, popular culture/mass media and psychological theories, he employs a critical view combined with a certain playfulness that exposes and questions ideas about our awareness of subtle nuances that occur everyday in our societies. These nuances are the things that in turn reflect and shape the perceptions we have of our existence, they have been discussed and analyzed throughout the ages and yet they are still the things that plague us with an ever present notion of our “unknowing”. He posits an internal struggle that is most often illustrated and debated through the use of one or multiple alter ego/selves, where most often, the characters/subjects have a hostile yet necessary and unavoidable harmony/accord with each other. It seems that although they will destroy you or you it, but most likely it you, a base symbiotic relationship exists; without one there is no other. Or could it be that it continues and the ego of self is so strong that we believe that we are it, or related to it as some sort of psychological defense that heightens our level of existence making life ”meaningful”.

In his new project “Happy Ending”, he crosses back and forth between and in combination of painting and video. It consists of a series of watercolors that are the foundation for a video generated from the paintings. The watercolors at once are beautifully abstract, psychedelic and colorful compositions that upon further notice are poignant raw illustrations of people having sex, at times they seem to be wrestling, fighting and engorging one another. These paintings act in an almost flipbook way, in that motion is created through the process of layering the images over and over with each layer slightly more askew than the last one creating a hallucinatory trail of the action depicted in the paintings. Using each layer as a stop animation frame, Park creates a video that completes the static motion into kinetic motion. Thus giving the paintings a living breathing life in video whose soundtrack takes us to a primordial sonic depth of mystery that transforms into an indelible erotic primal orgasm. He will also be showing a sculpture titled, “The wet dreamer”, which is based on Auguste Rodin’s, “The Thinker”, where Park inserts himself as the subject. It consists of a replica of the “The Thinker” carved in soap, but instead of his hand on his knee he holds his penis. The piece submerged into a clear tank reacts with water and chemicals that will make the piece disintegrate over time very slowly as if it is frozen in animation.