k-art in Munich
Push through the matrix of Jieun Park’s transnational translations.
Trained in traditional East Asian painting in Korea, and later in Painting and Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, Jieun Park’s canvas is a celebration of dual inheritance that flows between ink, mineral pigments, acrylic, oil, and wooden panels.
Though a forest appears still from above, Jieun’s Forest Series honors the panic and mutuality thriving beneath the soil. Settling down in Munich laid bare the arboreal truth that survival cannot be guaranteed in isolation. This guiding philosophy has since grown into three additional, deeply interconnected bodies of work: Untitled, Trace, and Text.
Trace employs the methodical layering of mineral pigments to mirror the unseen marks that human encounters leave upon us. It frames each of us as walking tapestries of every person we have ever loved, left, or happened upon in life. With performative flair, Text involves the repetitive act of writing out and erasing passages on architectural spaces. These words overlap, blur, and become illegible with time, covered by the debris of subsequent scribblings yet never vanishing absolutely.
For the Various Others (2025) exhibition, Munich’s Bayerischer Hof opened its private threshold to the public for the first time. Jieun took over its revolving glass entrance, hand-writing the Korean translation of Andy Weir’s The Egg, a short story centered on the cosmic truth that every human being is a reincarnation of the same soul. She rearranged the Korean script in a circular composition, and as visitors entered the venue, their physical movement caused the eponymous egg to activate and emerge. Without knowing it, they participated in Jieun’s own experience of the world, navigating a language they could not grasp, while finding shapes of meaning within.
Though many will forget the specific syntax of their pasts, Jieun assures us that we will continue to pass through the revolving doors of one another’s lives, leaving faint residues that matter on the glass as we go.
