Gahae Park’s work has evaluated visual, emotional and intellectual forms by drawing with cut paper, shaping and layering positive and negative space into rhythms. Park said her work deeply connects with the sound and structure of music. Music, by evoking abstract space, inspires the artist to create new spaces. Park meticulously cuts and composes, opens and closes paper, with a focus on creating lines that specify coherent patterns of light and shadows on a grid, forming a visual musical structure. In essence, the paper itself becomes the instrument that draws light into visual musical patterns. Each piece is a component, much like a movement, that comprises a larger integrated work with the theme of the ambient statement.
Park, a Korea-American artist, educated at Hong-ik University in Seoul and she received an MFA, Painting from Pratt Institute(2000). She had numerous solo and group shows over the last twenty five years at the Bronx River Art Center and the Queens Museum of Art, as well as the International Art Museum in Poland. She participated in The International Paper Art biennial in Sofia; Islip Art Museum, NY; and Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, Greece. Park has received the Pollock-Krasner Grant (2012, 2016), the F. Albee Foundation fellowship (2006), and the Art Omi Foundation fellowship (1999.) Her exhibitions have been reviewed in White Hot Magazine (April 2019), Sculpture Magazine (2009), Art in America (2006), and Brooklyn Rail (2007).
"My work fuses the raw material of music into visual, emotional and intellectual forms by drawing with cut paper, shaping and layering positive and negative space into rhythms. The paper is meticulously cut and composed, opened and closed, with a focus on creating lines that specify coherent patterns of light and shadows on a grid, forming a visual musical structure. In essence, the paper itself becomes the instrument that draws light into visual musical patterns.
Each piece, which is part of the individual work, is a component, much like a movement, that comprises a larger integrated work with the theme of the ambient statement. Sound, light and physical process, whether subjective or objective, throughinference, are all interrelated and consistent within this statement. I combine my paper work with the sound and structure of music.
My art is that of an independent self-conscious, self-constructing novel patterns within the constraints of predetermined boundaries of time and nature. Through space, time, sound and life itself, I express and represent the intervals that define my being. Music is taken for inspiration, as manifest of the continuous river which bridges the layers of emotional, intellectual, physical and metaphysical.
I use music as my inspiration. I translate sound into linear patterns that can be interpreted as either a visual image in terms of a language to be deciphered and read. Listening to music, I feel a space that flows like a river. This space is a real physical space. It is an abstract and metaphysical realm for me. Music, by evoking that abstract space, inspires me to create new spaces through my art. A visual sound of a diagram is related to a heartbeat with a feeling in my music drawings."