YEONKYUNG PARK
Park’s practice moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, guided by intuition and unconscious gesture. Using a towel or cloth to rub and soften pigment across the surface, she allows forms to emerge gradually, as if recalled rather than observed. This process becomes a quiet act of excavation, revealing traces of emotion, memory, and time. Her ongoing Still Life series centers on flowers, not as decorative symbols, but as meditations on transience, care, and the fleeting nature of beauty.
Flowers have long carried layered meanings across cultures. In East Asian traditions, they often symbolize humility, seasonal change, and spiritual reflection. In Western art history, flowers have served as powerful metaphors for life and mortality, from the vanitas still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age to modernist explorations of nature as emotion and form.
Artists such as Ambrosius Bosschaert, Jan Brueghel the Elder, and Rachel Ruysch elevated floral still life into a sophisticated language of symbolism, where each bloom spoke to time, fragility, and abundance. Later, figures like Vincent van Gogh and Georgia O’Keeffe transformed flowers into deeply personal and psychological subjects, while Cy Twombly distilled nature into gestural marks that hovered between writing, memory, and sensation.
Park’s work enters into this lineage while remaining distinctly her own. Her flowers do not announce themselves at full bloom. Instead, they appear softened, blurred, and on the verge of disappearance. They ask the viewer to slow down, to look closely, and to sit with what is fading rather than what is fixed.
As Park writes: “One morning, I woke up at early dawn. The color of the room was filled with a faint shade of blue, and for a moment, the world felt calm and still. In that fragile light, I felt an inexplicable sense of peace—a brief pause before the day began. Yet, dawn passes quickly. Within thirty minutes, the sun rises, and that soft blue disappears. That ephemerality made me realize how everything I love exists only for a short while.”
STILL LIFE (1), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
23.6 x 23.6in
60 x 60 cm
STILL LIFE (2), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
50.8 x 38 in
129 x 97 cm
STILL LIFE (3), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
23.8 x 19.7 in
60.5 x 50 cm
STILL LIFE (4), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
51 x 39.4 in
130 x 100 cm
STILL LIFE (5), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
51 x 39.4 in
130 x 100 cm
STILL LIFE (6), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
52 x 39.4 in
132 x 100 cm
STILL LIFE (7), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
55 x 44.5 in
140 x 113 cm
STILL LIFE (8), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
52.8 x 39.4 in
134 x 100 cm
STILL LIFE (9), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
57.3 x 44 in
145.5 x 112 cm
STILL LIFE (10), 2025
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YEONKYUNG PARK
Oil on canvas
63.8 x 51 in
162 x 130 cm