MeeNa Park is the subject of a solo exhibition titled Scream, on view at Over the Influence in Hong Kong through August 9, 2019. Park visualizes the rules and values that we learn implicitly as images, icons, and colors, 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, including paint colors readily available in the market or dingbat font symbols, are redrawn onto the canvas in order to produce a new narrative interpretation of the original icon. 

Park’s Scream abstracts the American cartoonist Charles Schulz’s signature character, Charlie Brown, into an icon, visualizing the act of screaming and portraying the sound waves from the character’s gaping mouth with various color gradations. When the artist first began to incorporate the screaming icon in 2005, Park’s original inspiration was from Edvard Munch’s The Scream and the classic Hollywood movie Scream. It was only after the audience’s repeated references to the cartoon character Charlie Brown that Park began to research the cartoon Peanuts. After two iterations of the Scream series, Park has introduced new variations to the screaming figure and heart symbol. The artist equates her series to a fugue, a musical form consisting of a theme repeated in higher or lower notes. This allows Park to delve into a subject with infinite variations, approaching it again and again in order to obtain deeper significance.