HONG KONG.- Over the Influence is presenting Korean Artist MeeNa Park’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, Scream, a continuation of the theme of Park’s 2005 and 2016 exhibitions of the same name. Scream opened on 4 July and runs until 9 August, 2019.

Well-known for her artwork series Color Collecting, Scream, and Dingbat paintings, MeeNa Park is interested in exploring 'ready-made' structures found in contemporary society. Since her early work Orange Painting (2002-2003), Park has explored the origin and the influence of icons and visual symbols. Such visual languages as paint colors readily available in the market or dingbat font symbols are redrawn onto canvas in order to produce a new narrative interpretation of the original icon.

Park’s Scream paintings evoke Charles Schulz’s unmistakable character, Charlie Brown, abstracted as an icon. The act of screaming and the sound waves it produces are visualized with various gradations emanating from the character’s gaping mouth. But when the icon was first used in 2005, Park didn’t intend for the figure to be seen as Charlie Brown - the original inspiration was actually a drawing on a pencil case. At this time, Park was thinking more about Edvard Munch’s The Scream and the Hollywood movie Scream. Only after people seeing the exhibition kept referencing the similarities to Charlie Brown did Park begin reading and watching Peanuts and collecting the figurines as a way of research. After two iterations of the Scream series, Park went back to it again, painting the screaming figure and heart shapes as the basic rule and introducing variations to insert new content. She equates her series to a fugue - a musical form consisting of a theme repeated in higher or lower notes. This allows her to delve into a subject with infinite variations, approaching it again and again in order to obtain more and more meaning.

MeeNa Park (b.1973, Seoul, Korea) received a B.F.A in painting from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and M.F.A in painting Hunter College in New York, NY USA.

She has had solo exhibitions at SeMA Bukseoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; Doosan Gallery, New York, NY, USA; Kukje Gallery, Seoul, South Korea. Her works has also been include in group exhibitions at Gwangju Design Biennale 2011, Gwangju, South Korea;Plateau, Seoul, South Korea; Art Space Pool, Seoul, South Korea; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, South Korea; Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan; The Heder Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel; Atelier Hermès, Seoul, South Korea; and Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, South Korea.