PARK Sunmin: The Architecture of Mushroom
The ecosystems of fungi examine abstract spaces and non-linear time.
The ecosystems of fungi examine abstract spaces and non-linear time.
PARK Sunmin, The Architecture of Mushroom, 2019, single-channel video, 15 min 18 sec. All rights reserved by the artist.
The Architecture of Mushroom (2019) presents a microcosmic worldview by observing a specific category of natural ecosystems and projecting it on to humans who want to rediscover a unique space that exists between the past and the future. The footage of larger-than-human-scale mushrooms in the forests of Jeju Island’s Gotjawal focuses on the smallest of ecosystems hidden within the vastness of nature, capturing and internalizing abstract spaces. The one-take video, in which the mushrooms are transformed into a single, intimate place of sensation, is accompanied by a narration of architects interwoven with their contemplations of time and space, breaking temporal uniformity; their stories become the stories of the mushrooms. The individual spaces intimately related to our lives that the architects speak of are closer to a sense of place that involves the principle of primary experience of recognizing objects or nature. The attempt to recall the essence of scattered objects, ecology and human life begins with observation, listening to the time and space that are overlooked or understood by chance, even right here and now as we are speaking.
About the artist
PARK Sunmin graduated from the Department of Sculpture at the Seoul National University of Fine Arts and moved to Germany, where she received a Meisterschuler under the guidance of Rosemary Trockel at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work questions the binary relationship between culture and nature, inside and outside, and encompasses a variety of media, including photography, video, drawing, spatial installation, publishing and design. Modulating and changing the distance between herself and the world, she gazes at objects, observing natural phenomena through the lens of a camera at a micro level and mirroring them at a macro level to decipher the fragments found in the cracks of the unstable life of the city.
