Weather Becoming

Pipe Gallery presents Weather Becoming, a solo exhibition by Eunjung Park, on view from January 20 to February 14. Park has consistently explored how fundamental human affect may be articulated through painting, and her practice begins with what she describes as “the process of visualizing affect.” The exhibition title Weather Becoming is derived from the phrase “under the weather,” which originated from the experience of Western sailors retreating below deck to escape storms or harsh conditions at sea. Literally meaning to be affected by weather, the phrase also implies a disturbance in bodily and mental balance, encouraging weather to be understood as an external force that modulates bodily states and conditions. Within this context, Park accumulates on the canvas sensations shaped by a diasporic life, the physical and psychological disorientation caused by repeated long-distance travel and time differences, and the fundamental bodily experience of childbirth. Rather than converging into a fixed identity or narrative representation, these sensations are inscribed on the surface as rhythms of unstable transition and adaptation. Through repetition, layering, erasure, and overwriting, color and form emerge as visual manifestations of affect in motion, composing a fictional yet ecological space in which environmental, biological, and emotional factors coalesce.

For Park, the experience of her first childbirth in 2024 marked a fundamental turning point—one that extended her sense of existence beyond a merely bodily event and reorganized the structure of affect. Following this experience, she became attentive to the linguistic qualities inherent in primordial utterance—forms of expression that precede semantic language yet already possess rhythm and structure. Drawing from this encounter, she began composing her own contemporary verses. In the line, “The door opens and new breath passes into this world; through the gate of blood, the first cry finds its path,” the recurring symbolic images and rhythms of doors and breath, flesh and light resonate deeply with personal experience, further expanding the conceptual ground of her painting. Here, the body functions as a medium that carries memory and experience, existing not as a fixed form but as a state of energy in constant flow and transformation. This understanding of the body overlaps with bodily images that appear throughout Park’s work, giving rise, within the painterly process, to colors and forms that exceed representation. These emerge instead as traces, figures, and signs that surface unpredictably through the act of painting. Such signs pass again through landscape-like thresholds, expanding into an imagination in which they return to primordial material states—blood, water, milk, sea, wind, and vapor.

In particular, the physically constrained conditions surrounding childbirth paradoxically led Park to perceive space as endlessly expanding, akin to a nocturnal sea. In the recent works Conversation in Water (2025) and Echo in the Mist(2025), water operates beyond the role of background, functioning instead as a sensory field in which maternity and existence first encounter one another, and as a medium through which pre-linguistic dialogue emerges. Within the hospital room—where joy and isolation, fear and sorrow converge—the artist and her child sense one another without orientation or direction, as if feeling their way through darkness. These submerged scenes extend beyond personal memory, unfolding into primordial conditions in which relationships are generated and affect circulates. In subsequent works such as Chromatic Pulse (2025), Becoming Heat (2025), and Vapour (2025), Park attends to cyclical transitions in which climate becomes affect, affect becomes body, and the body in turn shifts into light and material. Within these works, rhythms of existence gradually dissolve boundaries, unfolding as scenes in which disparate states connect and merge into a single sensory continuum. Meanwhile, in Crimson Genesis (2025), the color red condenses a threshold moment in which the birth of life—and the emotional and corporeal penetration that accompanies it—erupts with intensity.

Park’s painting does not seek to reproduce abstract landscapes of emotion. Rather, it constitutes a field of thought that investigates the process through which affect and memory, environmental context, and bodily condition intertwine, disassemble, and recombine—tracing the formation and transformation of existence as a state. Affect transitions into body, the body is translated into color, and color expands into landscape before returning to the atmosphere of emotion. This cyclical rhythm, shaped through repetition, layering, bleeding, and erasure, forms a sensory structure that runs throughout the paintings. Here, color and form operate not merely as visual elements, but as sensations of the world in which breath, heat, water, cries, and traces of memory accumulate. Ultimately, Park’s work may be understood as an attempt to render the climate of affect, revealing how existence is continuously re-formed and attuned within ever-shifting conditions. If, standing before the works, a viewer experiences a subtle wavering of body and affect that comes into contact with deeply embedded layers of memory, that sensation marks the world Park proposes, and the point at which painterly temporality is realized.