MeeNa Park 1995–2016

2018
offset lithograph, sewn in sections with exposed spine, with saddle-stitched booklet in slipcase
188 x 256 mm, 264 pp; supplement, 188 x 256 mm, 20 pp

The artist Park MeeNa is known for her rigorous approach that involves research, data gathering and analysis. MeeNa Park 1995–2016 thoroughly documents her body of work from over the twenty years. Spanning various mediums including painting, drawing, and installation, her work explores the external conditions of picture-making, its material and social basis.

In addition to her most recognized works – color picking projects, Scream series, Dingbat Paintings, and Coloring Exercise drawings – the book also includes documentations of her lesser-known site-specific projects and photographic works. In his accompanying essay, the critic Lim Geun-jun suggests Park MeeNa’s position in the historical context of modern art, throughly examining facts and statements surrounding her work. In another essay, the curator Hyun Seewon reflects on the ontology of painting without rhetorics or narratives, focusing on the artist’s Scream paintings and comparing them with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Edvard Munch’s Scream.

MeeNa Park 1995–2016 is a radically expanded version of an earlier volume, MeeNa Park 1995–2005, published in 2006 by Specter Press. Reflecting the artist’s prolific ten years since the original, the book’s extent has been nearly tripled, while the format and the design adheres to the first publication, so do the binding without covers and the supplement for Korean text. Long out-of-print and hard to obtain, the book has finally been made available again in a much augmented form.