Curated by Irene Gong, Echoes of Time Space776 hosts the first U.S. solo exhibition of Kejoo Park, whose introspection and hybrid vision of cultural history is conveyed through the formal language of abstract expressionism. Layers of semi-transparent paint form hazy surfaces and bleed downward through the pull of gravity. Stormy, turbulent, fluid, and gestural, these mixed-media works in greige and earth tones are rendered with rapid brushstrokes that overlay images of urban and natural vistas.

Kejoo Park was born in South Korea and educated in the United States. She now lives and works between Frankfurt and New York. While her commercial work as a landscape architect and urban planner has gained recognition in Germany and Switzerland, Park is also deeply involved in public art discourses, site-specific installations, sculpture and painting, as well as other art forms. According to curator Irene Gong, it is the synthesis of philosophical traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism, as well as Western Romanticism, that makes the multimedia artist’s work so captivating, coupled with her emotive navigation of the liminal space between nature and the viewer’s psyche.

In her exploration of the human condition, Park draws on the legacy of Joseph Beuys, one of the founding members of the Green Party in Germany. In the 1970s, Beuys developed the theory of “social sculpture” to emphasize the communal and political nature of art as something that not only exists in society, but also Is Society. For the seventh edition of the Kassel Documenta, Beuys designed 7000 oaks in 1982, which involved planting 7,000 trees, each with a basalt stone next to it. After Beuys’ death, the public art project was expanded overseas, to 22nd Street in Chelsea, Manhattan. Beuys told Richard Demarco, “I think the tree is an element of regeneration, which in turn is a concept of time. This is particularly the case with the oak because it is a slow-growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture.”

Drawn to this art-historical hallmark, Park created site-specific installations, including stones in wooden frames suspended from the gallery ceiling. Suspended in a state of serenity and austerity, these sculptures transform Beuys’ ambitious project into reliquaries – intimate, quiet and immediate. In the Homage to Beuys In the series, monolithic, rock-like figures wander the sidewalks, and behind these shadowy figures, the trees planted along the curb are visible. The familiar cityscape is permeated by a haunting sense of mysticism, psychological loneliness, and temporal ambiguity. The art-historical allusion becomes even clearer in Homage to Beuys 3 (2024), in the upper left corner of which floats Beuys’s typical felt hat.

The exhibition also includes three works by Parks The Song of the Earth Series that translates to “The Song of the Earth,” named after Gustav Mahler’s 1908–09 song cycle of the same name. Each canvas is split in half down the middle, perhaps to reflect the artist’s fascination with philosophical opposites that oppose and complement each other—human vs. nature, independent vs. interdependent, living vs. still. Rhythmically and aquatically, the pieces in this series recall Monet’s Water Lilies with an emotional twist. The stormy lines, resembling the traces of an ink painting, reflect the laborious sorrows that characterize Mahler’s music, which was written after the loss of his eldest daughter, a heart defect diagnosis, and the anti-Semitic political persecution that forced him to resign from the Vienna Court Opera. Drawn to the affective intensity of the Austrian composer’s works and equally overwhelmed by the Taoism and wandering romanticism of the Chinese poet Li Bai, Park creates these works as the ultimate ode to from picture poetryand conveys a feeling of balance and fusion.

After the exhibition closes, Gong will continue to work with Park through her newly formed company, PPULI PROJECT. Gong is supported by several prominent figures in the art world, including Pepe Karmel, who teaches at NYU. “After seeing Kejoo Park’s work at Irene Gong’s New York exhibition, I was introduced to a significant artist who needs to be discovered in the United States. I am thrilled to hear from her. The Earth Projectwhich will present Parks site-specific installations in four cities around the world,” he commented. Throughout 2025, Gong will produce and curate Parks site-specific installations through PPULI PROJECT The Earth Project.

Meanwhile, at the intersection of Eastern and Western cultural history, Park identifies a space of infinite possibilities by using nature as her language. As I wander through stones, water, lakes and trees, I lose myself in a song of permanence and transience in Echoes in Time.

Kejoo Park: Echoes in Time will be on display at Space776 New York from July 26 to August 28, 2024. The exhibition is curated by Irene Gong.

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