Korean Artist Digital Archive Project: Park Youngsook  

About Park Youngsook

1961: Joins the Modern Photography Society. 

1975: Holds solo show featuring photos of women of her time from various walks of life, including wig factory workers, sex workers, computer programmers and stay-at-home mothers to celebrate the International Women’s Day proclamation supported by the United Nations. 

Park is a photographer and an indispensable early pioneer of Korean feminist art. Since her debut in the late 1980’s as a minjung (“the people,” especially the marginalized) feminist artist, she has produced a distinctive body of work, rooted in practical civic activism and consciously engaged feminist critique. 

Photography and women are the two watchwords most often associated with Park’s art. Using photography as her main medium of creative expression and a means to examine gender and cultural disparities in Korean society, she has created works that are consistently feminist in spirit. Marked by an unwavering attention to women’s issues, otherness and social marginality, her photographic works are imbued with an interrogation   of gender inequality and staunch commitment to the representational power of the photographic image. Mad Women Project, her best-known photo series, made a compelling case for feminist gaze through a powerful portrayal of the discriminatory realities that women face every day in Korea, particularly disproportionate childcare responsibilities, workplace discrimination, a massive wage gap, physical and sexual violence and a double-standard on sex work and prostitution.

From 2007 to 2018, she ran the photography gallery Trunk, curating and organizing exhibitions to discover new artistic talent in Seoul. A multifaceted career like Park’s, as a photographer, curator, feminist activist, lecturer and columnist, was, in fact, something quite uncommon among the first generation of Korean feminist artists. Like Ip Gim, Park felt compelled to take on these various roles to help this budding field and commitment to institutionalizing female practitioners’ critical interventions through photography and beyond. 

Her solo show in 2016, held at Arario Gallery, was a new turning point in her career because …... Later, in 2017, as a full-time photographer, she had another solo show at the Museum of Photography in Seoul, titled Could Not Have Left Them Beh ind. In addition, she is scheduled to hold a solo exhibition, Tears of Shadows, also commissioned at Arario Gallery in early 2020.

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The Art World of Park Youngsook: On the “Mad Women Project” and Others

Kim Hong-hee(Art Critic, Chairman of Nam June Paik Cultural Foundation)

1.

Park Youngsook, a photographer who left her footprint in Korean feminist art history, has established a unique body of work as a practical activist and conscious feminist since her debut as a feminist artist of a Minjoong art(people’s art) affiliate in the late 1980s. The two keywords underpinning her art is photography and woman. Even though the role or portion of photography in contemporary art is tremendous and many female artists use it as their main media, few photographers have been more dedicated to feminist art, with consistent concern for women, the other, the periphery, and with a thorough consciousness of gender and representation, than Park has.

Park, who had her first solo exhibition in 1966, began to attract much attention in Korean art circles in the late 1980s by presenting works with heavy feminist tones like “Mad Women Project,” her representative work which cemented her place as a feminist photographer in the true sense of the word. However, the artist suddenly stopped her artistic career in 2007 when she opened a photography-only gallery “Trunk,” allowing young artists to present their works and making efforts to find and support new artists. Then, after a long absence, she was invited as an Arario Gallery’s representing artist to have a solo exhibition in 2016, which provided a breakthrough for taking her back as an artist. As if the past ten years’ absence was wholly the time for recharging herself, she closed the gallery and entirely devoted herself to work. She had a solo exhibition “Could Not Have Left Them Behind” at the Museum of Photography, Seoul (MoPS), in 2017 and these days, is preparing another one “Tears of Shadows” which is about to be held at the Arario Gallery in March 2020.

2.

Park’s career as an artist began with an exhibition in 1975, which was already marked by a remarkable sense of

femininity, a renegotiation and de-objectification of the female form and an early unmasking of the “male gaze” found in photography. This “Photography Exhibition” was organized by the Korean National Council of Woman in commemoration of International Women’s Day, an important gender acknowledgement and human rights observation marked by the United Nations. The council was initially determined to hold a group exhibition but later had to modify the group exhibition to ask instead Park for a solo show because they were unable to find artists who wanted to participate due to the general lack of understanding about the photographic medium and feminist themes. Under the banner of equality, peace, and love, Park focused on social issues relating to women’s realities and presented photographic works which recorded a naturalistic survey on different aspects of women’s lives: not only female manual laborers carrying stones on the banks of the Han River, a street vendor and her baby sleeping in a box, sex workers on the backstreets of Yeongdeungpo, sparce and dilapidated dormitory rooms for wig factory workers, but also immaterial jobs of some prestige, like female computer programmer at KAIST(Hongneung), and a contented housewife living in an apartment.

In 1981, Park had a solo exhibition, “The 36 Portraits,” at Gonggan Sarang Gallery in Seoul. After recovering from 

breast cancer surgery at the age of 39, which had significantly impacted her life both physically and spiritually, the artist photographed the portraits of her successful acquaintances in business leaders, popular entertainers and sports stars. “The 36 Portraits” was a dedication to these cultural icons in Korea, who like her had distinguished themselves in their respective fields, such as painter Suk Ranhi, basketball player Park Sinja, actor Park Jeongja, TV drama writer Hong Seungyeon, poet Kim Yeongtae, and Architect Kim Won. And perhaps because she, too, was encouraged and motivated by the envy, respect, and gratitude that she expressed toward them, Park added fresh fuel to her artistic practice with pioneering feminist works. Next year, Park had a solo exhibition “Nostalgia” at Pine-hill and began to participate in many feminist group exhibitions which emerged in the mid and late 1980s.

3.

“Let’s Open the Dams,” an exhibition organized under the theme of the “Encounter of Poems and Paintings on

Women’s Liberation,” was a significant event which opened the cultural floodgates not only to Korean feminism to take hold and influence society, but also to position Park as a leading feminist artist. In this group exhibition which featured works by poets Go Jeonghee, Kim Hyesoon, and Cheon Yanghee, and four painters Yoon Suknam, Kim Jinsook, Jung Jungyeob, and Park Youngsook, Park presented Rose and Witch which conveyed a metaphor of femininity and female imagery in an experimental sequential format consisting of serial scenes. If the former represented the mystery of the female body, the latter invoked the spirited independence and supernatural essence of the witch.

On the occasion of this exhibition, in 1992, Park joined Women’s Art Research Association, a Minjoong feminist

group, and began to regularly participate in the Association’s annual exhibition “Women and Reality,” which marked Park’s radical feminist activities. Led by women artists such as Yoon Suknam, Kim Insoon, Kim Jinsook, Jung Jungyeob, SeoSookjin, and Kwak Eunsook, Women’s Art Research Association had played a central programming role in laying the foundation for the socialist-influenced feminist art in the Korean artistic scene since its establishment in 1985 as the women’s division of the Minjock (National) Art Association.

In these days, with interest in collaboration and anonymity, Park presented a series of works in collaboration with Yoon Suknam. “Self Image,” one of these collaborations presented in the 1992 “Women and Reality” exhibition, was composed of the photo image of Park’s nude torso with one of her breasts removed from her mastectomy surgery, here one sees Yoon’s wooden torso with a light bulb hanging from it, complementing a co-written poem, “I Hang a Light Bulb to the Severed Part.” 

“One Day of Yoon Youngsook and Park Suknam,” shown in the 1993 “Women and Reality,” was the two artists’ collaborative installation that reprimanded women’s mindless and mandated domiciliary daily routines. To maximize the anonymity of the work and protect against public vitriol, Park and Yoon switched up their family name in the title. For the 1994 exhibition “Woman, the Difference and the Power,” these two artists produced another collaborative installation, “Story of the Womb,” consisting of a slide show and delicate fabric work. This was a full-blown essentialist feminist work to praise the nature of the maternity, domesticity and femininity, which narrated the Mother of Heaven and the Mother of the Earth with the oral sound and a slide show in a fabric womb.

It was the series “Mad Women” presented in “Patjis on Parade,” a Korea’s first-ever large-scale feminist exhibition in 1999, that made Park’s name known not only to art circles but also to the cultural scene of the3 country and gained her the support from feminist communities. Because the socio-pathological and psychoanalytic implications of “mad women” appealed to experts and the intense subversive nuance of them stimulated the hidden instinct of the (women) audience, the series created a response bigger than was expected from the work title. Indeed, “Patjis on Parade” was organized with the apparent intent to subvert the existing gender ideology and the paradigm of representation, by overturning the traditional Korean fairy tale Kongji and Patji. Both the exhibition suggestive of the protest of Patjis and the works on display, showing the women’s madness, created the effect of feminism and the reversal synergy, in that they problematize the woman archetype as a subaltern figure and diagnosed the woman as a cultural signifier with sadly little agency at the time. After that time, Park presented in succession the series of “Sexuality is Lost for Women” (2001), “Imprisoned Body, Wandering Spirit” (2002), “Gay (Monsieur Butterfly) and Lesbian” (2003), “Project for Money Reformation” (2003), “Feminists in Osaka and Tokyo” (2004), “WOMAD—The Goddess of Heyri” (2004), “A Flower Shakes Her” (2005) and “Witch Within Me” (2005), completing the Mad Women Project consisting of these nine series.

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The Mad Women Project produced from 1999 to 2005 was the culmination of her ingenuity in dealing with  feminist tropes and civic activities, which came to articulate the artist’s strong female awareness and gendered pride. She began to participate in academic lectures and the writing drill run by the feminist movement group called Another Culture in 1986 and also led, impressively, education programs as a member of the Women’s Culture and Arts Planning and a director of its Academy in 1990. All these experiences and accolades brought her feminist consciousness to the surface and to many in the Korean cultural sphere.  As such, discussions and studies with the members of the Women and Reality group, research workshops of the Reality and Cultural Studies (as a member of its steering committee), and solidarity activities with the Feminist Artists Group Ipgim (breath) each reinforced the artist’s feminist perspective both theoretical and practical applications of art and activism. More concretely, the influence of post-structuralism, such as Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality and History of Madness monographs, inspired Park to reflect on the realities of Korean women through the lens of gender madness or hysterical woman, who “could not live a life without being crazy” due to the loss of identity and humiliation in patriarchal society that repressed women’s feminine self and their innate desires.

In other words, the Mad Women Project is a pioneering work of psychoanalytic feminism, infused by French thought and Korean societal reactionism. Regarding the female madness as an equivalent of the “good girl” complex, the project directed a psychoscopic lens towards the women’s repressive realities in which they could be free only when they were insane. As the artist stated, the project was “to express what they tried to say with their body so desperately that they were going crazy, through ‘acting out their gesture,’ and ‘going mad for them’. . . to represent the stories that have been only repressed or covered up as if being unnoticed by anyone … This is how speaking through the body, communicating through the body,and healing through the body began. I think that excavating women’s hidden stories is feminism and the role of feminists.”

“Mad Women” in 1999 had galvanized the Mad Women Project and caught the public’s eye first due to the provocative title. Park had the chance to photograph real institutionalized women but eventually chose the method of staged and performative photographs in the vein of Cindy Sherman, 4 hiring models because she thought that appropriating mentally ill people as an object of her study was a kind of double objectification. Such documentary photography was morally questionable to Park and there is a long history of scholarship that speaks for the differently abled instead of coopting and commodifying their despair. So the models shown in her photographs were the artists of Ipgim or her close feminist acquaintances, such as Yoon Suknam and Lee Hyekyung. Unlike professional models who pose themselves as they are told, these amateur artist-models were fervent advocates who actively discussed with one another and added their ideas to the photographic composition in the studio. The project, conceived and planned by Park, gradually received broad sympathy from peer feminists and expanded to a sisterhood-based, self-developed feminist project. In the series “Sexuality is Lost for Women,” the artist understood that sexuality and eroticism were the masculine languages created for and by men. She considered the invisibility and inexpressibility of feminine desires as the cause of gender oppression and encouraged the recognition that gender, like sex, is a patriarchal product constructed socially and historically. The series “Imprisoned Body, Wandering Spirit” delivered a liberation narrative of longing for escaping from the fear and violence of everyday life and everyday space to the woman-only, fantastic, warm, and cozy time-space. For “Feminists in Osaka and Tokyo,” produced with the support of the Japan Foundation, Park moved the focus to Japan to organize a empathy project for Japanese feminists caught in the severity of extreme patriarchy and violence. Through the empathic experience to play a mad woman before the camera, recollecting the 1980s when the Japanese feminist movement was at its peak, they not only accused the present realities of Japanese women but also witnessed the traumatic experiences of their contemporaries.

The series “A Flower Shakes Her” is a criticism about the traditional analogy between women and flowers, which are commonly equated with beauty and feebleness as the object of the male gaze. This analogy has been repeatedly found in sad legends of flowers orold tales of women who led a life of deep sorrow, some spinsters and are thus reincarnated as a flower. Regarding these photographs of flowers and women that are identified with each other through madness, of women united as one with the “blossoming land,” poet Kim Hyesoon sang these verses: “how the land can bloom unless it is mad? … How can a woman sing and dance unless she is mad?”

If all these series mentioned above were self-critical reflections on the women as seen by men, a gender who is only seen, not who sees, Park takes a somewhat different step “Gay (Monsieur Butterfly) and Lesbian” (2003), which was exhibited in the exhibition “Left out of Favor,” hosted by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea. This work expresses concern about the extreme discourse on the body that rejects sexual determinism, in an extension of the Mad Woman Project. Here, the artist pays attention to sexual psychologies and behaviors that had been seen and communicated in society as taboo, abnormal compulsions, such as homosexuality, and challenges the sexual identity and the falsity of gender that had been constructed by patriarchal hegemony.

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The series “Project for Money Reformation” (2003) from the Mad Women Project extends the problem of women to the realm of social institutions. Money is a representative economic indicator which formed a patrilineal nexus, and perhaps because of this focus on male aristocracy, portraits printed on Korean coins and bills are principally historically important male figures, such as Sejong the Great and the former conservative president Rhee Syngman. As a reaction to banknotes featuring male figures from Korean history, Park presupposes a re-circulation of bills with the portrait of female icons, acting as an alternative to this male-centered currency and produced and published typically. 5 In other ways, this became a female money by and for women. As personalities whose portraits would be on the bills, the artist selected five mythically or historically relevant women who had progressive values and led independent lives. They were Grandmother Samsin (the three gods governing childbirth), Heo Nanseolhyeon (a celebrated poet in the mid-Joseon Dynasty), Crown Princess Minhoe (one of a consort for the Crown Prince Sohyeon), Empress Myeongseong at the end of Joseon Dynasty, and Na Hyeseok (Korea’s first female Western Painter and recognized by modern art history as a canonical artist) and these women all belong to the line of “mad women” in Park’s language. The feminists who were active at that time, such as Lee Hyegyeong, the then director of the Women’s Culture and Arts Planning, poet Kim Hyesoon, women’s studies researchers Kim Yeongok and Im Okhee, and painter Yoon Suknam, took the so-called role of the five ‘old mistress’ mentioned above and would pose in front of the camera. Non-masculine motifs, such as flowers, food, embroidery, and shaman instruments, were used on the bills, and its basic monetary unit was also changed from ‘won’ or ‘hwan’ to ‘saem (spring),’ the source of life, to create a subversive female money in the true sense of the word.

The series “WOMAD –The Goddess of Heyri, the Goddess in the 21st Century” is a ritualistic project yearning for a new paradigm of women’s culture. According to its eponymous book written by Mongolia expert Kim Jongrae (Womad, Samsung Economic Research Institute, 2002), the ‘womad’ is a compound, portmanteau of “woman” and “nomad” which points to “women who are living like the lamplight in the heart of a modern society that is both neo-nomad and neo-matriarchal.” Because the womad pursues the lifestyle of being a perfect woman who strives to achieve professional success while keeping the traditional value of the home, it may remind one of the almighty ‘alpha women,’ a creature in this age of neoliberalism. A newer incarnation of femininity tied to a competitive market logic in career and material affordances coupled with post-feminist outlook about their sexuality and agency as contemporary woman that ultimately serves her male partner/spouse.   In other words, these two types of women are different: while the alpha woman refers to elite women who are self-managing, conformist, practical, and superior to men (Dan Kindlon, Alpha Girls: Understanding the New American Girl and How She Is Changing the World, Rodale Books, 2006), in a word, masculinized and high-power women, the womad, in contradistinction, is more related with the feminine leadership based on the symptoms of the matrilineal society and the traits of the digital age, such as movement, mobility, change, and nomadic sentiments. So in this way, inspired by Kim Jongrae’s revelatory vision that the Korean society would also become a ‘womad society’ where women would be allowed to perform to the best of their abilities, Park organized the goddess project to recover the matrilineal female culture. Interestingly, the womad as was appropriated by the artist is not a goddess of the past, but a wise and curative goddess of the 21st century who has an alternative vision and a subversive eye to cope with global phenomena, the future society. Park supposed that these womads would appear in Heyri, Paju, near the DMZ, in the form of four goddesses. They were transformed from four storm- pillars that were created when a gust of wind blowing on Heyri divided these structures in four opposing directions. The artist’s four feminist friends posed as these womads, the goddesses in the 21th century, who were expected to purify the world: the goddess of fertility in the East who controls production and creation (modeled by singer An Hyegyeong), the goddess of love in the West who represents love and passion (modeled by professor Kim Soogi, Department of Acting, Korea National University of Arts), the goddess of indignation in the South who will burn all kinds of injustice for justice (modeled by theatre director Moon Seonghee), and the goddess of death in the North who takes the pain of others upon herself and willingly embraces the world of others (modeled by Kim Hyeseung, Women’s Film Festival).6 The last series of the Mad Women Project, “Witch Within Me”(2005), is staged photographs of the witches within women, the witches that “are completely insane despite efforts to hide it,” posed by Kim Jisoo, Lee Gyeongmi, and Ye Jiwon, and theologian Jeong Hyeongyeong. The witch is one of the themes frequently found in Park’s works, as in “Witch” which was shown in the exhibition “Let’s Open the Dams,” and the series “Tears of Shadows,” which was shown in her2020 solo exhibition at Arario Gallery, the latter work is yet another important narrative about witches.

Classical Korean folklore imbues the witch with its typical association to patriarchal discourses demands viewers to comprehend and contemplate the remorse for and reflection on human civilization and history. In art history, the sorceress has been represented to be a negative image of womanhood and profession, that they should be expelled like the monstrous Medusa or the vile and defiled prostitute. As women or mad women have been characterized in Korean society, the witch figure is a human-made archetype, whose category was artificially created, and the violent repression of her is justified legally due to her occult powers and independence. Park not only sends a warning to these prejudice and insolence but also tries to overthrow the imageries of “good girls” of Kongji type, or of “happy mothers,” the emblem of bourgeois ideology, by presenting the ‘femme fatal’ witch as the alter ego within the self, instead of the curative, positive image of women, such as Muse, holy women, and virtuous ladies.

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Since Park’s Mad Women Project is a feminist work that reduced the timely discourse of madness to the issue of mad women, it presents itself as an object of feminist criticism. In this context, one needs to notice the implications of madness, such as the otherness and the fantastic. Returning toFoucault’s History of Madness, which archaeologically and anthropologically traces the historical process of classifying the concept of madness as abnormality or its otherness to sanity, and disseminating it as the object of discrimination and exclusion, Park understands the mad woman trope, who have been regarded as abnormal others, as a product of women-oppressing, male-dominated society, patriarchal history, and challenges the traditional concept of the woman by staging the experience of other playing the role of mad woman. To achieve the deviant emancipation from the reality in which women “cannot survive without being crazy,” in other words, in which inevitably “every woman is mad,” the artist carried out a play of emphatic fantasy to collapse the boundaries between reality and unreality, and between normality and madness. The fantastic is connected directly with the otherness implied in madness. As Tzvetan Todorov claims, the fantastic occurs when the borderlines of reality/unreality, normality/abnormality become ambiguous. Because the borders are unclear, the fantastic remains as an invisible and unknown area and, as such, is frightening and threatening (Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 1973). When the invisible reveals itself visibly, however, its subversiveness to disturb the center is also released. This subversiveness means the rebellion of the periphery fully charged with the illegal energy that broke out of the name of the father, or the return of the others as subalterns when the powerless have acquired their language. For this very reason, fantasy is fearful and subversive and, thus, takes effect as the genre of female narrative art or political feminist political art.7 The otherness or the fantastic of Park’s works comes from the nonconformist acts of playing the other, that is, mad women, and the medium to make it possible is photography. The artist converts photography, the medium of record and memory, into a medium of ocular fantasy which directs and stages the diachronic and synchronic feminine narratives, transcending time and space of the here and now. She does not photograph, record, what is occurring before her eyes. Instead, she makes up and directs a fictitious narrative that becomes possible through the photographic method and then represents a pseudo-reality as accomplice to that very narrative. Because it is absent and impossible, the narrative she desires is bound to be magical, ritualistic, and fantastic. The artist conveys the consistent theme of mad women via the expressive form of staged, even costumed-driven and performative-styled photography.

So it seems that all the series from the project have similar formats or compositions, even though they have different subthemes. In most of these photographs, Park shows the portraits of women standing, sitting, or lying down in the exterior environment or indoor space that looks related to the theme. Models always pose in almost the same dramatic expressions even in an abstract setting decorated with patterns of the body or plants as in case of “The Goddess of Hey ri” and “Witch within Me.” In this way, staged photographs stylized with the same format constitute the typical style of Park’s “Mad Women Project.” It is interesting that her feminist friends and colleagues who play the role of model in Park’s style, or amateur models, are given a weight greater than expected as subject sitters. The artificial expressions and poses of these professional feminists who are not accustomed to posing in front of the camera are not mundane, extreme, or comic, but this rather brings out a reverse kind of affective gaze that is more iconic. Due to the lack of plausible naturalness, documentary realism, Park’s mad women are neither frightful nor hideous. They rather seem to play pseudo-madness as childish naivety than the psychological “uncanny” or physical “grotesque” typically associated with clinical definitions of lunacy. Park’s mad women who are played by leading Korean feminists appear as the friendly alter ego within all of us contrary to an insane person as the other. So, ultimately, isn’t the Mad Women Project establishing an equation that “feminists equal mad women” through the role of feminist models and at the same time, undoing that equation with “simulacre” of madness?

7.

By focusing on senior women in her 2017 solo exhibition, “Could Not Have Left Them Behind” at the Museum

of Photography, Seoul, Park took the issue of ageism, another crucial subjects of contemporary feminism to interrogate through her photography. Since the artist presented this series as the first phase of her old women project, titled “Women’s Narrative. Women’s Objects,” the photographs displayed in the exhibition could be indeed regarded as the first version of silver feminism, which the artist now in her seventies has produced by visiting, photographing, and interviewing elderly ladies in their eighties and nineties. Seven individuals, including one director of a theater company and the stage designer Lee Byeongbok, the painter and fashion designer Kim Biham, the master pansori (Korean epic chant), the singer Choi Seunghee, the wife of poet Kim Sooyoung, Kim Hyungyung who is the wife of businessman Park Gyungae, CEO of Andong Halmae Cheonggukjang, and Restaurant owner Lee Sangjoo, and his daughter-in-law who is the head family of a clan/gallery owner Lee Eunjoo, became subjects of Park’s camera. As the very lives of these seven women show, they are successful, elite elders and far from the traditional image of the mother who lives as self-sacrificing life or suppressed women under the patriarchal system. Perhaps, in this late career work, Park intends to perform a feminist task with the narratives of the past, present,8

and future of these older women, who not only have pursued both their family and career goals but also turned the sorrow of their old age, anger, aging, and the fear of death into a positive life? In the male-, adult-, and generation-centered society that Korea enables, the hierarchy of age, like that of gender, power, class, and appearance, is one of the main factors to cause social prejudice, alienation, and discrimination. In particular, in the Korean society the ever-present influence of Confucian traditions, one finds that ageism towards childhood and old age is not only the issue of feminism today but also one of the most monumental tasks to advance to an age-flexible and age-inclusive society. The patriarchal society in which middle-aged men hold the central place and often regard the elderly female group, like ‘mad women,’ as the object of exclusion and an unremarkable demographic, as deficient and senescent. However, instead of this attitude of despising senior women as “ugly old women” and their body as monstrous and grotesque, the mature attitude of praising the naturalness and experiences of old age which has the power of creating a society of all-directional communication, marked by mutual empathy between generations and between genders, and the culture of cosmopolitan and Korean hospitality that embraces the weak and the other. These are what represent the task and justifiability of (Park Youngsook’s) feminism that focuses on anti-age-separatism and anti-ageism.

8.

As was explained in the above discussion, Park’s feminism has changed with the current of the times from her works in her 1975 solo exhibition to the 2017 exhibition “Could Not Have Left Them Behind.” Her early photographs captured the scenes of women’s labor and sexual inequality from the socialist point of view, like those of female workers on the riverside of Han River and sex workers in Yeongdeungpo, which were presented in “Photography Exhibition,” held in commemoration of the International Women’s Year, Since then, Park took an essentialist line founded on women’s physical and psychological experiences. “Story of the Womb,” produced in collaboration with Yoon Suknam for the 1994 exhibition “Woman, The Difference and the Power,” was one of the typical works in this line. Like first-generation feminists of the Victorian England and Western Europe or many essentialists after them, Park and Yoon took a motif from the womb, the most effective metaphor for the female body, and used fabrics and embroidery which came into the spotlight then as alternative feminine media and the  feminist style. Furthermore, in that the work was the result of two artists’ collaboration, it also tapped into a sentiment of sisterhood. This shows that the Minjoong art feminists at that time came to devote themselves to essentialism with its focus on feminine types and feminine aesthetics, on the base of socialist consciousness. Essentialism is the most problematic issue whose track becomes different according to whether to consider the essence of womanhood as inborn or acquired, fixed or unfixed. While first-generation feminists adopted the determinist position of separatism, women-centeredness by understanding womanhood as a fixed category, second-generation feminists recognize it as non-fixed, that is, “being in process,” and deconstruct the notion of femininity that has been constructed patriarchally by employing psychoanalytic methods. “The Mad Women Project,” initiated  by the series “Mad Women” (1999), and the recent series “Could Not Have Left Them Behind” suggest that Park’s work is passing from the earlier stage characterized by socialism and essentialism to the next based on the deconstructive discourse. If the former had the theme of psychoanalytic9 madness, the latter challenges the gender rigidness of dichotomies between men and women, and young and old generations, with anti-ageism and simultaneously deconstructs the patriarchal notions of gender and sexuality. However, on an emotional level, Park’s work seems to preserve the sentiment of essentialism, rather than the characteristics of deconstructive feminism, often viewed as an elitist and ideology of pedantry toward genderism. Even though influenced by the socialist consciousness or using the deconstructive approach, the artist has never left essentialism. Indeed, undeniably, essentialism is the crucial concept or trend of feminism, which not only reminds us of the original intention of feminism with its popular appeal and impact and always rears its head irrespective of times. If Park’s feminist works are viewed from this point of view, it could be concluded that this artist has established her unique feminism at the crossroads of socialism, essentialism, and deconstructionism.

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