Jina Park (b. 1974) captures countless fleeting moments of everyday life through photography and reconstructs them into paintings. She focuses on everyday places where something is happening, such as the scenes of museums preparing for exhibitions, the strangers at airports, and the backstage of film sets.

Jina Park's work begins with carrying a camera in everyday life, recording serendipitous, fleeting moments as snapshots. Her early works involved creating short narratives using found images, such as snapshots, postcards, or passport photos from her surroundings.

Among these, the Lomography (2004–2007) series consists of paintings created with the aid of a toy-like film camera. The camera used for this series was an inexpensive model with four lenses, capable of capturing four consecutive frames in one second, relying more on intuition than precision for framing subjects.

The Lomography series reflects the artist's experimentation with the immediacy and format of this sequential shooting camera. This exploration laid the groundwork for her later works, where sequential scenes appear more prominently, further developing her experimentation with capturing time through painting.

In her early works, Jina Park primarily focused on scenes from her immediate surroundings. However, starting around 2010, she began painting scenes from exhibition spaces, marking the intersection of personal memory and the act of documentation in her art. Park often observed and photographed the preparation process of exhibitions she participated in. This practice of recording people working in specific settings became a recurring theme, with unfamiliar figures increasingly populating her canvases.

Jina Park's paintings exhibit a documentary-like realism in capturing moments from reality, but her approach to expression is intentionally understated and loose. The indistinct outlines and lack of detailed depiction amplify the "fleeting quality" she seeks to convey in her work.
 
Regarding her method, Park explains, “Blurring and loosening my drawings reveals the transience of the moment. Through layered brushstrokes, I aimed to show the process of painting itself.”

Since 2013, Park has been depicting anonymous individuals she encountered at airports. This marked the beginning of her work featuring unfamiliar figures rather than those from her immediate circle. Park notes that she observes with a greater sense of detachment when painting strangers compared to familiar subjects. The unique nature of airports, with countless people coming and going, led her to rely solely on her impressions of those fleeting moments to remember and paint the figures.

While her earlier works captured artists or staff working in the familiar setting of art museums, her focus later expanded to rehearsal spaces and film sets. These new subjects naturally introduced a greater number of figures and more intricate compositions into her paintings, reflecting the complexity of these environments.

This shift also brought a notable change in perspective: many of her works from this period are drawn from a bird’s-eye view, a vantage point that looks down on the subjects from above. Park explains that she adopted this perspective as a compositional device to organize the many figures within a single frame.

The arrangement and composition of figures in Jina Park's paintings reflect her deliberate artistic intent. For instance, during the process of reconstructing images into paintings, Park often overlaps and combines multiple photographs to create her desired composition. As a result, the same individual may appear twice within a single frame, or images captured on different days may be merged into one scene.

Park consciously avoids compositions where the focus is centralized or biased toward one side. She has expressed her desire to create “horizontal paintings without hierarchy.”

In crafting such compositions, the gestures of the figures play a pivotal role. Park pays close attention to simple, repetitive actions, such as raising a hand or lowering one's head—ordinary movements devoid of symbolic meaning. She selects these unintentional, in-between gestures or ambiguous actions to structure her scenes.
 
As a result, the figures in her paintings are depicted without narrative depth, rendered simply and flatly. While she portrays people, her approach resembles that of a landscape painter rather than a portrait artist.

Meanwhile, the series Happy New Night (2019–2020) captures the unique atmosphere of nighttime. This series began with depictions of scenes from Germany, where fireworks are lit to celebrate the New Year. The fleeting moments of fireworks in the dark night are represented in the paintings as white, object-like masses.

Park’s exploration of nighttime as a setting in her paintings traces back to 2007, with a series titled Moontan (2007), which can be translated as "Moonlight Bathing." This series portrays nighttime strolls in the park. To create these works, the artist used a camera flash to document late-night scenes, which she then transformed into paintings. The resulting images reflect the effects of artificial lighting rather than natural moonlight, rendering the figures in her paintings reminiscent of actors on a dimly lit stage.

Jina Park’s latest series, Kitchen (2022–2024), currently on display at her solo exhibition “Rock, Smoke, and Pianos” at Kukje Gallery, Seoul, depicts scenes from restaurant kitchens. This body of work continues her exploration of individuals engrossed in work behind the scenes, capturing and reconstructing fleeting, accidental moments observed in bustling kitchen settings.

In Kitchen, as much focus is given to the intricate countertops, diverse cooking utensils, and rising plumes of smoke as to the figures absorbed in their tasks. True to Park’s approach of avoiding hierarchy within the composition, neither the people nor the objects in these works stand out as the central subject.

Jina Park utilizes the camera to capture unposed, everyday moments. For her, the function of photography lies in seizing accidental scenes that might otherwise escape the naked eye, preserving images in a "state of transition." 
 
Park defines painting as "both image and material," and she has consistently focused on the unique materiality of the painting. The chance moments recorded through photography are later layered over time onto the canvas through the materiality of paint, acquiring a new temporality and physicality in the process.

“I find great allure in the fact that painting is both image and material. A painting can perform many roles that images are capable of—recording reality, inspiring imagination, and providing visual pleasure. At the same time, it is also the paint applied onto a surface, and during the process of creating, its materiality becomes strongly perceptible.

For some painters, these two aspects might seem contradictory, leading them to emphasize one side more heavily. For me, the appeal of painting as a medium lies in its ability to hold both aspects in equal tension simultaneously and harmoniously. This balance is what motivates me to explore it further.” (Jina Park, Artist’s Note)

Jina Park graduated from Chelsea College of Arts with an MA in Fine Art after receiving her BFA in Painting from Seoul National University. Recent major solo exhibitions include “Human Lights” (2021) at Kukje Gallery, Busan; “People Gathered Under the Lights” (2018) at Hapjungjigu, Seoul; “Neon Grey Terminal” (2014) at HITE Collection, Seoul; and “Snaplife” (2010) at Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul.
 
Park has also participated in numerous group exhibitions and events, including Sungkok Art Museum (2024), Busan Museum of Art (2023), Seoul National University Museum of Art (2023), Daegu Art Museum (2022), Incheon Art Platform (2021), Museum SAN (2020), SeMA Storage (2019), Plateau (2015), plan.d. produzentengalerie e.V., Düsseldorf (2015), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2015), ARKO Art Center (2014), and Gwangju Biennale (2008).
 
In 2010, Park was nominated as one of the finalists for the Hermès Foundation Missulsang, and her works are in the permanent collections of the Seoul Museum of Art; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Daegu Art Museum; and Kumho Museum of Art, among others.

References

• 박진아, Jina Park (Artist Website)
• Radar Seoul, 박진아 – 순간의 기둥들 (Radar Seoul, Jina Park – Pillars of the Moment)
• 동아일보, 찰나의 이미지를 포착하는 화가 박진아, 2010.12.23
• 캔 파운데이션, 박진아 (CAN Foundation, Jina Park)
• 노블레스, 찰나에서 영원으로, 작가 박진아, 2023.03.20
• 국제갤러리, 휴먼라이트 (Kukje Gallery, Human Lights)
• 국제갤러리, 돌과 연기와 피아노 (Kukje Gallery, Rocks, Smoke, and Pianos)