A bitter joke. It is a common feature that we are presented when encountering Bona Park's work. Her work in various mediums such as video, photograph, installation and performance subtly fabricates situations that can be found in daily life and lets the spectator interface within the awkward state of affairs. The artist does not attempt to deceive the viewer by trapping them between fiction and reality, yet rather she exposes the absurdity of which is beyond notice through her witty yet pungent play.
In Not A But B (2010) Park presents another joke resisting formal orthodoxies. The artist constitutes her critical parameter for the perception of a work of art, exploring how the contextual integration of an artwork's authority is emerged.
The work is a novel project that appropriates varied ideas from different people. Commissioned by Korean curator Dae-bum Lee for his project Novel 01: In Search of Jun-ho Lee, a collection of artists' writings including an imagined character named Jun-ho Lee, Bona Park has taken as its starting point from the unrealised writing by Mikolaj Lozinski. Lozinski renounced his plan to write a novel about a person who has the same name with a famous person. Park found Lozinski's discarded scheme in Italian curator Cecilia Cuida's archival project Forgotten Ideas, which collects abandoned ideas from diverse artists, curators, writers and other creators, and wrote about Jun-ho Lee. Jun-ho in Park's novel named after a famous Korean activist who was against for the Japanese colonisation, but she has a tedious and unsatisfying life, teaching English at the small institution while being pressured to compare her life with the activist.
Not A But B is the collective ideas, which resembles Lee's and Cuida's associated projects; borrows its motive from Lozinski's idea; and collates the narrative story created by Park. Additionally, the process of conceiving various ideas extends as it involves a number of participants in its project-in-progress. Originally written in Korean, it will be translated into multiple languages when the work is presented in different countries, including the translators as participants.
Encompassing certain related ideas and blurring the boundaries of the authority of an artwork, Park's Not A But B is an indication of a transformation in the state of appropriation. However, as Park's humorous approach in her practice takes a gesture of withdrawal, the use of appropriation in her work differs from appropriation high-lighted in the mid 1990s, which aimed to subvert the dominant system in a more peremptory way. Appropriated ideas in Not A But B address not the death of the author, but a possible format which both an individual and collective ideas coexist; it does not question to whom the work belongs; it rather seeks for a new subjectivity by mapping of where it stands in relation to the surrounding notions. The work is a continuation of the journey in a search for a certainty in the uncertain flow of ideas.
It might be early to say if the journey to search for its new subjectivism would succeed or not. Instead, I would rather say that Bona Park's playful gesture seems to suggest new terms of approach to intervene in the pretentious rhetoric that echoes in the dominance of Western ideas and the market power in art. Her bitter joke, which seems at once to veer away from the positive engagement of the status of the current circumstance, paradoxically discloses the hidden overwrought grandiosity, thus the withdrawal gesture located in her work very self-consciously becomes a gentle shout which urges the awakening. With this intriguing joke, setting up a stage for interaction with the viewer, the relationship between ideas and socio-cultural paradigms is re-contextualised. And it would be a step to find post autonomy in contemporary art.
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