Abstract

This study analyzes two of Park, Beom Shin’s latest work, Eungyo and Trifling Landscapes. Released in 2010, Eungyo became a big issue as it brought up to the surface the biological aging of humankind and the sexuality of elderly. Released in 2013, Trifling Landscapes is different from Eungyo in terms of subject matters, but it can also be interpreted on the same extent as it dealt with the desire of a student and teacher for writing and the conflicts of desire and love among three men and women. Eungyo depicts the exclusive love of human beings who are destined to be confined in the limited calibration of time, while Trifling Landscapes shows the original form of love born by free beings in the causality of time. In this respect, it is valid to say that Trifling Landscapes both extends and exceeds Eungyo. The focus of Eungyo is the problem of human existence suffering between the natural aging of physical body and the sexuality that never ages and the agony of a person who struggles between the desire to substantiate himself through literature and the lack of natural talents. Eungyo depicts the exclusive love that eventually leads to destruction three people who have their unique ways of love, while Trifling Landscape depicts the collective love of free entities that are not confined to body and time. The triangle of three people in Eungyo all about jealousy and conflicts, while the triangle of three people in Trifling Landscape shows the original form of love that is possible just because it is a triangle. This is possible because Park’s premise is that love is the deep understanding to reach the essence of the other, beyond narcissism. The collective love in Trifling Landscape is also the aesthetic completion of art. The plot of Trifling Landscape, where the inside and outside of the epic intersect without being confined by the causality of time, also matches the internal flow of the story that deviates from all conventional ethics and norms.