LYDIA SOOJIN PARK
Art Grows From Joy and Sorrow
11 January - 3 March 2024
Everything, including time and emotion, accumulates and leads us somewhere new. Lydia SooJin started considering the ceramic genre in diverse cultural settings and applied her personal values and inquisitiveness to ceramics scouts. Her ideas are rich in the concept of relativity, and she conveys the metaphorical message that 'it is not completely all that is seen' through the sculptures that briefly resemble vessel shapes such as vases and kettles but ultimately challenge the notion that external characteristics fully capture the essence of functional ceramics.
Munch's quote "Art Grows From Joy and Sorrow," which anyone could relate to, struck her as deeply thoughtful one September. She once again realized that our lives were not always sad and happy, as if our days were also imbued with a complexity that defies simple categorization. Unfamiliar feelings can be experienced as freshness, and routine from day-to-day living can be perceived as stability. In other words, everything depends on your mind. Once again, it provided an opportunity to consider the world's relativity in everyday life beyond the realm of ceramics.
By harnessing the variability of materials that dry out in the air and solidify in heat, she conveys the meaning of accumulation, a prerequisite for the concept of diversity to be born (created) before the concept of relativity. Through the repetition of piling up the textured clay of different thicknesses to complete different organic-shaped sculptures, the idea of the accumulation of time and emotion is visually transferred in a similar way to how we collect memories. Furthermore, the intangible emotions and thoughts derived from everyday life are visually manifested in a myriad of hues on sculpture through unpredictable glazes. The soft curved shape found in the work connects not only Lydia's genre concerns about ceramics, longing for nature, and expression of accumulation, but also the flow or fluidity of inspired stories in everyday life.
Lydia SooJin Park (b.1989, Seoul) lives and works in Oslo. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013; an MA from Hongik University, Seoul in 2021; an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and was honorably awarded the Student Prize 2023 by the Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts. Park has been exhibited worldwide in London, Seoul, Trondheim, Bergen, and Zurich. Her work can be found in prominent institutional collections including KODE Bergen, Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, and Universal Ballet, Seoul.