COVID-19
A Korean artist who attended art school in the U.S. before returning to his homeland, Yangbin Park has seen the world around him shift and shift again, as he moved from one country to another, one city to another, one apartment to another. But always he brought along his stuff, packed in boxes and shipped by EMS, Fed Ex or USPS. These delivery services have become Park’s de facto collaborators in a series of silkscreens that record and riff on the labels used to address and track parcel post. Two are viewable online in Give Me Space, the latest version of the International Print Center New York’s biannual open-call for new work. Both are named “Return to Sender” for the dreaded stamp that alters the course of a shipment, and one in particular proves much more aesthetically rich than might be expected of an artwork based on a familiar bit of bureaucratic form-filling. A dark gray background offsets bright yellow lines and speckles atop which float mint green address highlights and gashes of blood red mark-ups. Makes a person want to pay more attention to the mail—and to postal workers.
—Lori Waxman 2020-11-02 5:11 PM