Everything Returns to Desert

About the exhibition

Walking across the sands of the Sahara Desert, I came upon the bodies of two camels lying opposite each other like fortresses. Looking at them, he said they had probably fought to death. Under the blazing sun, I gazed at the bones, bleached white and glistening in the sand, and picked up a fragment, telling him I wished to keep it. He looked slightly uneasy, but allowed me to take it. Back at the lodge, holding the bone, I reflected on the strange tension between the fear of witnessing death and the desire to possess a beautiful form.Then it struck me, perhaps I had violated some implicit order. After much hesitation, I returned the bone to him the next day. Smiling, he said, “A good decision. I’ll return this bone to its place. Everything is born of the desert and returns to the desert.”– from the artist note Memory is at once selective and beyond our control. It settles deep beneath consciousness, surfacing without warning, indifferent to intention. In fact, memory is nothing more than a partial collection of responses to countless stimuli. Yet when these fleeting waves break through once more, they are reshaped by the subject’s thought and perception, emerging into language or form that renders them tangible. Shinyoung Park reconstructs the sociocultural characteristics of unfamiliar environments encountered while traveling across different regions into subjective records. Her work often explores the boundaries between humans and animals, civilization and nature, reality a