Park Junwoo’s practice is akin to tending a world of his own. Rooted in the visual language of underground comics and zine culture, he has developed an emotional ecosystem that expands across digital drawing, painting, sculpture, and animation. His world is not merely a space of fantasy but an allegorical landscape shaped by people observed on the street, fragments of lived emotion, and the intersections of fatigue and desire, anxiety and recovery. The artist often says his thoughts begin in the street. Passing faces, shifting crowds, and accidental collisions transform within his compositions into a singular garden where humans, plants, emotions, and living beings intertwine.
The figures and creatures in this exhibition connect, proliferate, and continuously transform. Rather than embodying disorder, they reflect a mental structure that acknowledges the present condition. In Park’s universe, the fatigue of care coexists with the joy of being alive. The act of sustaining the world one must protect becomes visual energy, revealing an attitude of coexistence that includes the self without dissolving into it.
In Garden of Chaos, excessive imagery and nonlinear sensibilities drawn from underground comics collide as flowers, insects, and human faces entangle across dense surfaces. Emotions proliferate and fade like natural processes, each presence maintaining its own rhythm. In contrast, Hidden Lives presents layered green structures concealing smaller forms of life, where transformation mirrors the human condition as continuous growth and mutation.
Park has acknowledged the influence of Henry Darger (1892–1973) on his method of world-building. Darger’s vast fantasy novels and monumental drawings—assembled from thin sheets of paper into immersive visual universes—resonate with Park’s approach. Like Darger, he weaves comics, drawing, painting, and sculpture into a living cosmos shaped by personal emotion and experience.
When asked why he depicts bodies in fragmented forms, Park replied, “If I draw too much, it becomes boring.” To disrupt habitual gestures, he rotates his right arm across his torso and draws as if using his left hand. Expanding the aesthetics of Xerox art—formed through the self-publishing of his digitally drawn comic zines—into painting, he disturbs lines, alternates pens, layers paint over drawing, and recreates misaligned halftone distortions using tattoo pens, syringes, and airbrush tools. His drawings function as records of repeated actions—“draw, paint, look”—revealing a persistent inquiry into how emotion and aesthetic intention may be visualized. The resulting bodies condense anxiety, collision, exhaustion, and desire into tangible forms.
In an era of accelerating AI-driven image production, Park places hand-making at the center of his practice. Worlds conceived through digital pen drawings re-emerge as works on paper and canvas, and ultimately take physical form as carefully molded Sculpey sculptures. By calling these works “hand drawings,” he underscores the tension between virtual construction and material presence as a core principle of his aesthetics. Park Junwoo’s garden is a space where reality and the virtual are inseparable. Within it, competition and coexistence, exhaustion and renewal circulate continuously. His work begins with a direct gaze at life and unfolds as an allegorical landscape searching for forms of emotional survival in the contemporary world.
