Park
Hyun-Ki was a trailblazer in Korean video art for having first introduced video
to the domestic art scene. Whereas the internationally-renowned video artist
Nam June Paik primarily worked outside of Korea and only became involved in the
domestic scene from 1984, Park Hyun-Ki, already in the late 1970s, had begun to
adopt the moving image into his distinctive body of works.
Park
was born in 1942, while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule, to a Korean
family of modest means based in Osaka, Japan. When Korea regained independence
in 1945, the family moved to Korea and settled in Daegu. In 1961 Park
matriculated at Hong-Ik University's Painting department but transferred his
major in 1964 and completed his degree in Architecture. After extensively
studying painting and architecture, Park returned to Daegu in the early 1970s
where he worked in the architectural and interior design business to fund the
monitor and camera equipment for his artistic activities.
Park
began to distinguish himself as a notable artist at Daegu Contemporary Art
Festival (established in 1974) and increasingly more so by extending his scope
with his participation in Bienal de São Paulo (1979)
and Biennale de Paris (1980) followed by numbers of exhibitions in Japan in the
1980s. The domestic attention turned to his favor in the 1990s when video art
came into the limelight in Korea, leading to the production of some of his key
works, such as Mandala Series and Presence & Reflection Series, all emerged
since 1997. While still in his heyday, Park was unexpectedly diagnosed with
stomach cancer and passed away in January 2000.
Park
has left an extensive volume of works and archival resources in what could have
been a relatively short 58-years of his life. With over 20,000 resources, which
have been comprehensively archived and first made available to the public for
the occasion, the following retrospective at MMCA stands out from the other
posthumous attempts to recast a light on the artist’s oeuvre. From the notes he
made as a student in 1965 to the sketches completed immediately before his
death in 2000, the selection for the exhibition encompasses a span of 35 years
in the artist’s life and art. In addition to the exclusive survey of the
artist’s works, the exhibition, an attempt to convey the artist's “nearly
everything,” includes reproductions created based on the archival resources.
Park's
works are remarkable in that it offered an interpretation of video, a new
artistic medium in his time, from a very Eastern philosophical disposition. His
early works consisted of inserting a monitor displaying footage of stones to a
pile of real stones. This overlapping of “ordinary stones” and the “stones on
the monitor” blurs the boundary between reality and illusion, recalling the
fable on the legendary poet Li Bai(701-762) who has drowned himself while reaching
for the moon's reflection in the river.
In
1960s, while in his 20s, Park received lessons on Korean tradition from an
80-year old man at Gwang-guh-dang in the Village of Nampyeong Mun Clan located
in the vicinity of Daegu. Park self-condemningly remarked that he had been
“deceived” by westernized curriculum and devoted his life in questioning how to
couple the traditional Korean vision with the Western formal language that was
segueing into the dialogue of “Postmodernism.” As a result, his work formed a
field of energy where all the extremities of the world-such as what is
considered oriental and western, still and moving, and divine and
secular-clashed and coexisted with one another.
His
quest was not of realizing “high-technology” through the medium of video. On
the contrary, it very well could have been his devotion for lasting,
fundamental values of humanity amidst the ever-transforming nature of the
media. For Park, “media” was a mere tool that alluded to a “cosmic code” that
would forever remain as an undecipherable mystery. With over 1,000 works and
resources from the artist's archive, the following exhibition hopes to offer
glimpses into the core of the artist and provide the grounds for further
research into the artistic oeuvre of Park Hyun-Ki.
