Sobin Park – ENTER THE DRAGON

About This Project

Venice. Spazio SV  proudly presents the exhibition Sobin Sobin Park: Enter the Dragon curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos. The show will run from April 16 to November 24, 2024 and will be celebrated with a reception on Wednesday, April 16 from 6pm.

Sobin Park: Enter the Dragon takes place during 2024 the auspicious year of the dragon in Chinese astrology, and appropriately but loosely references the title of the 1973 Robert Clouse film Enter the Dragon, starring the legendary martial arts Bruce Lee.

This show includes Park’s immense drawings that comprise a special recollection of Park’s artistic imagination; her powerful dragon forms, as well as the rippling depictions of her symbolist females, mythically betokening all the beneficial properties of the Wood Dragon. As totems of a sui generis creativity, they function as symbolic images of the powerful creature that mythically embodies the cherished hopes and dreams of nearly all Eastern cultures, that is, as benevolent harbingers of evolution, improvement, rejuvenation and abundance.

Park considers the ever-changing medium of drawing, re-vitalizing the dragon iconography in a creative dialogue with the vast realm of modern and contemporary art. The innate power of her art springs from the exceptional uniqueness of her artistic practise. Obsessively drawing on her immense canvases with a tiny pencil, Park’s painting process is reminiscent of a hypnotic dance, wherein her fluid gestures, ecstatically springing from here to there on the vast maximalist surfaces, perform a kind of Taoist ritual, virtually re-imagining the dragons into revitalized beings, while transforming herself into one of the sensual maidens.

Bio

Sobin Park (1971~) was born in Gwangju, Korea. She earned a BFA from Mokpo University and an MFA from Chosun University. Since her first solo exhibition in 1993 at the Kumho Culture Center in Gwangju, she has held over 30 solo exhibitions at various galleries including the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York (2007), the Chelsea Art Museum in New York (2009), the Gabarron Foundation in New York and Barcelona (2013), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete in Athens (2015), and the Today Art Museum in Beijing (2017), Tenry Gallery NYC (2023), Gwangju Museum of Art / The Myth of Dragon (2024), Inniyte Love. She has also participated in artist residency programs supported by Bushwick Open Studios and Vermont Studio Center in New York. Since 2011, she has been active in various parts of the world, including Korea, New York, and Europe, with a base in China through the residency program of the Gwangju Museum of Art in Beijing.