“When I looked closely, and for a long time, it was far from something round and red. I kept thinking about whether an apple has to be round and red,” actor Park Shin-yang said.
Park said he began painting after two apples given to him by the late Bishop René Dupont started to rot and he could not bring himself to throw them away. As he painted, he moved from asking how to draw an apple to asking what painting itself is. He has since painted about 40 apples, he said, and over time the apples in his work became neither red nor round. Through that process, he said, he found his own sense of movement: an apple does not have to be round and red.
Park is holding his second solo exhibition at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts’ museum. At a March 6 news conference at the venue, he said, “Everything is expression,” adding, “The word ‘expression’ doesn’t hold unless you talk about ‘me.’”
He also stressed the need to understand one’s feelings before trying to talk about them. “To speak about my emotions and express them, I first have to know what kind of emotion it is,” he said, underscoring the importance of knowing oneself.
As he painted and examined his emotions, Park said he traced the roots of his longing to a friend named Kirill, whom he studied with while in Russia. “Kirill is the person I know who looks at people with the most generosity,” he said. “He’s a friend with a gaze that opens up the possibilities of existence, a friend who puts you at ease.”
Like the apples, Park said he painted Kirill in different ways. He said people told him, “If you miss your friend, you can just go see him,” but that was not the point. He said he asked himself when and where the longing began, when it grew strongest, how it eased, how it guided him, and whether longing is a common or even necessary human emotion.
He said he tried to place on the canvas not only feelings toward the person he missed, but also his attitude toward those feelings. Interpreting his emotions and trying to understand himself, he said, naturally led to painting.
The exhibition is closely tied to that self-exploration. Calling theater the background of his life, Park said he designed the show as what he described as Korea’s first theatrical exhibition.
In the exhibition, which he calls a “studio,” 15 actors perform like spirits between the paintings and visitors. The staging is meant to let the “fourth wall” — the invisible boundary between stage and audience — shift freely between reality and imagination.
Park has described himself as having lived as a clown. In his book <Discovery of Emotions>, he mentions the fourth wall and recalls, “The distance I tried to forget keeps catching my eye now.” In the exhibition, the spirit-like figures in clown form cross that unseen boundary.
Asked near the end of the news conference why he pursued theatrical elements even if some visitors might feel uncomfortable, Park replied:
“I don’t know why I shouldn’t try. No one knows whether it will be uncomfortable or enjoyable,” he said.
The exhibition runs from March 6 to May 10.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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