These days, gallery exhibitions are installations of works created in artists' studios. In the case of Park Sung-tae, however, one could say that the process takes on more importance than the work itself. Of course, the installation implies this process, which is why the concept of "process art" has appeared in performance art, land art, and conceptual art. Park innovates again, however, by boldly challenging not only exhibition methodology, but the installation object itself. For his most recent show, he first had the idea of creation human skin from molded paper. He called it "Cloning Trap", But just before the opening, in an effort to transform the exhibition method, he replaced the paper skin with aluminum mesh. On seeing it, one might doubt that the change was necessary, that maybe he had mistaken his own exhibition concept and lessened the impact of the whole.
To someone like me, however, who had seen the transformation that took place in the artist's thinking, there's no doubt that Park's project was fully conceived. To me, he changed thinking to improve the installation, to express the subject more effectively. For the present exhibition, the concept he has chosen is an important one, one for which he has used one hundred percent of the environmental, architectural, and gallery conditions. One realizes that his giving in to the temptation to change everything based on one sudden creative impulse results in concentrating the subject of the work.

In preparing this exhibition, Park thought deeply about how to give shape to concepts such as existence, object, communication, sharing, life, evolution, traps, cloning, the future, heaven and earth, civilization, modernity, attitudes, values, boundaries, transformation, desire, providence, and infinity. He thought about the problems confronting man in modern society and concentrated on a new kind of man, a man of the future. He took risks; he changed the exhibition's concept several times before coming upon the final one: What if the value of man in a time of cloning and technology?

His installation begins with the problem of respect for life in a world where it will soon be possible for scientific technology to clone a human being. The Bible states that man if the most noble of all God's creations and that he should "be happy on earth and multiply". The Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote that "Man is the measure of all things". Humanists during the Renaissance, postulating the Golden Mean based on the Roman architect Vitruvius's thinking, looked upon man as a microcosm of the universe. However, alongside man's respect for himself as a possessor of a soul and an intellect, there is man's savage side, his destructive character. Recent wars and terrorism, famine, violence, and destruction of the environment throughout the world demonstrate that the calamities springing from too much or too little rationalism are part and parcel of our reality. People are optimists who look to their intellect to improve life, yet they find themselves confronted with a monumental challenge to their humanity. Science founded on rationalism supported by technology and genetics makes cloning a human finally possible.

On the one hand, human life is a gift from God; on the instance, an artificial intestine. Cloning is linked to money making. Test-tube babies, gene splicing, and the advances of the Genome Project all ask what it means to respect humanity. This is today's reality.

Traditionally, religion, education, and culture postulate respect for humans and nobility of life. Nature here is an ethics based on the heart of man. Further and greater advances in science could shake up these principles that respect the sacredness of life.

Cloning, creating genetically calculated and incubated "people" without parents, which was once a ho-hum staple of science fiction such as Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and the movie "The Matrix", now presents us with the real specter of a new "humanity".

In Park's work, shapes of people made from aluminum mesh are both real and suggestive of the virtual, of the cloned being. Through their projected shadows, they reveal an existence in space that is real and unreal. The babies that cover an entire wall of the exhibition space suggest incubated lives or cloned masses, and the column that links them from the basement to the ground floor is like a technological tower of Babel. Each aluminum-mesh link structuring the column symbolizes a digital byte, implying that the nursing babies in the column installed to look like a test tube are a new species of life: clones. On the wall of the second floor, the incubated babies are indeed mechanically cloned and spread out like a ribbon.

Mystery and respect for life is distant.
In reality, babies once thought to be the essence of joy have become fear itself on what we hope, maybe against hope, in this far-away planet, somewhere in the future. What a trap man has created for himself and fallen into! Park demonstrates that civilization's violence against nature is now also directed at itself. In the basement, human skin floats around the ceiling, a symbol of the failure of modern civilization to maintain its respect
for life. We're living in civilization's twilight. We're living an apocalypse.

The artist's work, however, doesn't project this precarious and tragic view by looking at the future as a dystopia triggered by modern science. The proof is in the babies on the wall of the second floor. They are created in the colors of the rainbow, symbolizing that man's power if in his life, a life that is still capable of casting away future darkness. Without specifically expressing it, Park suggests that the spirit can be liberated through a moderation that is best exemplified in traditional painting and respect of all living things, of oneself and of the other. This is a vision of the world where phenomenon and essence are not separate concepts, but one that overcomes an arrogant civilization's communications breakdown and possible destruction. He explained to me that for as long as he has been expressing his artistic consciousness of the world through traditional painting, he hasn't used rice paper as simply a material but as a medium imbued with a life that embodies respiration and aspiration. What's more, each aluminum-mesh link symbolizes digital culture in its largest sense in the same way that rice paper breathes. To Park, when scientific technology can finally breathe, it will become a space in which man will be able to breathe. Rice paper's breathability is not just a material quality, but a symbol of its capacity for communication. A black ink drawing doesn't prevent the rice paper from breathing, it makes it smoother and richer. This is an ethical belief, for it means that the artist believes in constant respect for life in the face of negative advances in scientific technology and the terrors of a civilization in which beings are but shadows, but mesh and skin. That Park Sung-tae would try to 'draw space' with light in spite of his difficult subject if proof of his hope for a future bathed not in darkness, but in brightness.

Choi, Tae-Man, Art Critic
(Translated by Jang, Young-Hae)