Through a spectacular installation in the rotunda on the 4th floor of the museum, the Korean artist Park Dong-Soo is invited to mark his return to the international artistic scene, after fifteen years spent in a hermitage in the region of Haemi (South Korea). South).

Park Dong-Soo has been creating lunar environments since the early 1990s, inspired by cosmogony and the study of the origins of the universe – notably the collision of planets and volcanic eruptions. Born in Seosan in South Korea in 1964, he moved to Paris in 1990 to study plastic arts at the School of Fine Arts in Versailles and then at the University of Paris 8. He left France in 2008, caught up by nostalgia for his country, where he now lives close to nature.

The installation That placeconsists of two sets that form a single whole: large black and white canvases deploy their microscopic universes on the picture rails while cubic sculptures of the same colors are installed in the center, arranged in a circle like a Big Bang and distributed according to a increasing order of size towards the center, in a pyramidal structure, like a volcano whose eruption would disperse a multitude of small pieces of lava on the ground. The artist lets us see both the flow of frozen magma from the effusive volcano and the projection of rocks and ash from an explosive crater. The cubes then resemble fossils. All the rectilinear geometric shapes – canvas, faces of cubes – are the receptacle of non-figurative circular worlds where, in relief, swarm on their surface, as in a view under a microscope, cells, plankton or sperm. Then unfolds before our eyes the evolution of a form of life, the development of a metabolism, something like mitosis or cytolysis.

Curators
Claire Bettinelli, production manager for contemporary exhibitions and collections (Guimet museum)
Henri-François Debailleux, art critic