Eighty-four thousand prayers, delicately suspended in different moments of bowing, fill the canvas. Each prayer, serene yet fervent, is in one’s meditative cosmos. Yet, they are not rigid nor isolated. Together the prayers form a wave, tides, and ocean. Gracefully zooming in and out between a droplet of prayer to the flow of the vast ocean, Park Cheong Yong’s dedicated strokes connect himself, fellow prayers, and the ripples of life.
The long and solitary process of Buddhist meditation grounds Park’s work as shown by the nuanced spreads of ink or paint representing thousands of prayers in a simplified and solid form. However, the prayers and the tides they conceive do not look somber or oppressive. Suffused with the colors of the deep ocean and soft rainbow, the prayers “enjoy,” as Park says, both shadowed and sparkling moments in life that come and go. For Park, the virtue of emptiness does not exclude colors or other people. It starts by yielding a space to them. Park’s tidal prayers seek peace in emptiness for all.