Park Hyun-gi 1942-2000 Mandala, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Gwacheon
Park Hyun-ki is a pioneer in video art that has introduced video to art in Korea. While the world-renowned video artist Nam June Paik started to travel to Korea only in 1984, mainly in a foreign country, Park Hyun-gi has been using video media for his works since the late 1970s to do unique video work.
He was born in 1942 in a poor Korean family in Osaka, Japan, during the colonial period. After liberation in 1945, he moved to Korea and settled in Daegu. In 1961 he entered the Department of Western Painting, Hongik University, but graduated in 1964 with a major in Architecture. Painting and studying architecture throughout a field he 1970 to nakhyang’s second in Daegu, hand, and make a living in the interior construction projects, and poured their money into it to work activities to buy a monitor and camera.
He began to emerge as a major artist of the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, which began in 1974, and broadened his international perspective early on by participating in the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1979 and the Paris Biennale in 1980. In the 1980s, there were several exhibitions in Japan. 1990, while in South Korea’s two up in the craze for video art was the work of bakhyeongi spotlight, he in 1997 after years of < Mandala > series < epiphany (顯現)> began to pour out such a masterpiece series. It receives attention as a pioneer of video art in Korea who is nine times the peak.
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 archives donated by artist’s family, which have been comprehensively catalogued and first made available to the public for the occasion, the 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. With over 1,000 works and resources from the artist’s archive, this 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.
58 for not longer the life of the three, he left a lot of works and materials. An attempt has been made to refocus several times bakhyeongi after his death, it is his retrospective exhibition held at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, this unique 2 is the point of the exhibition it is only open his data up to that point the public is the first complete cleanup. From a school note in 1965 to a sketch before his death in 2000, a wealth of material has been selected and displayed for 35 years of his life and art. In addition to not only the exhaustive left his work now, relives his major work on the basis of various data (再現) to naemeurosseo, the bakhyeongi ‘ almost everything ‘ served to put on display.
The reason is his extraordinary work that he ‘Video’, while leveraging new media at that time called, is that put it over the very basis of the oriental spirit. His initial video work included sandwiching a stone video monitor between the stone towers. ‘ Just a stone ‘ and ‘ monitor stones ‘ are overlapped with each other is, what is real and what obscures the distinction of cognitive illusion itself. As if it was unable to distinguish between the moon and the moon reflected in the river floating in the sky, two hundred and left a legend that drowned in the river japeuryeoda month (李白, 701-762), as the spirit of the world.
Bakhyeongi is already 1960 ‘s 20 of nampyeongmun Mr. segeoji of cod suburban garden in one age ‘ gwanggeodang (廣居Hall ), at 80 he began to learn again, from traditional for the elderly from the beginning. The Western Education ‘ duped ‘ while he earned, he do the traditional worldview of Korea is already ” post-modernism ” clung to life to ask if I can be combined with the Western way towards the formal language. So his work is of oriental as western, static as dynamic will, the sacred as secular, etc. will all extremes of the world (極端) are a kind of conflict and coexistence with each other ” energy field (場)” to form a.
He did not seek to realize ‘high tech’ through video. Rather, he can be said to have focused on finding the ultimate values of humanity that may be permanent even in the constant transformation of the media. In him, ‘ media ‘ is nothing more than a tool that suggests ‘ cosmic code ‘ that will remain a mystery that will not be solved forever. Through this exhibition introduces the works and archives up to thousands of points of check jinmyeonmo and bakhyeongi, and look forward to providing an opportunity to study in earnest about it.
Documentary photograph of Park’s Poplar Event held at The 3rd Daegu Contemporary Art Festival (1977). The artist drew the shadows of poplar trees along Nakdong River using lime powder. The white lines in symmetrcal repetition to the actual shadows were drawn on the ground.
Untitled was presented at Park’s first solo exhibition at Seoul Gallery (July 3-9, 1978), for which the artist embedded an artifical stone made of glass into a pile of real stones.
A video installation and photograhy set, which recorded the scene of Nakdong River located in outskirt of Daegu. The mirror which was set in the middle of river reflects the image of the slowly running water. This work was exhibited in Park’s solo show at Hankook Gallery in 1979.
Documentary photograph of Video Inclining Water Performance presented at XV BIENAL INTERNACIONAL DE SÃO PAULO (October 3-December 9, 1979). The water on the monitor shifted in congruence with the orientation of the monitor.
One of Park’s key works, this “video stone tower” was presented at 11e BIENNALE DE PARIS (September 20-November 2, 1980) held at Musee d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centre Georges Pompidou. A montior displaying an image of stones was embedded into a pile of real stones, alluding to the blurred boundary between reality and illusion.
For Pass through the City, a 16-meter wide artficial stone with a mirror attached was loaded to a large trailer to be driven across the central region of Daegu while the responses of the passerbys were photographed and filmed. The result of the performance was exhibited at Maek-Hyang Gallery in Deagu from March 17-28, 1981.
Untitled was a video installation presented at Media as Translators (June 26-27, 1982), an exhibition held at Gangjeong region of Nakdong river. Six performances were held during the course of two days, the process and outcome of which was documented with photographs.
A work presented at the artist’s solo exhibition at Inkong Gallery in Daegu (May 21-26, 1990). The work consisted of spreading the wooden rail ties the artist had collected on the ground and sparsely placing, inbetween the ties, the traditional pounding stations (used for smoothening clothes) made of birch. The two different objects created an exquisite harmony with corresponding shape and proportion.
Long wooden sleepers, either vertically or horizontally, were cut on the one side to create multiple sections onto which monitors or stones were inserted.
The Mandala was exhibited at Kim Foster Gallery in New York (June 26-July 26, 1997). The image of mandala, a symbol of universal truth in Tibetan Buddhism, was projected onto a crimson pedestal used in ancestral rites. Although an immediate impression is that the projected image consists of geometric iconography, the image is a composite of pornographic imageries that comments on the ambiguous boundary between what is sacred and secular.
A work presented at The Korean Culture & Art Foundation’s Fine Art Center in Seoul for the exhibition Park Hyun-Ki: Video Installation 1977-1998 (September 4-16, 1998). The work was first introduced at the exhibition A Point Contact-Korean, Chinese, Japanese Contemporary Art in 1997. With a resounding noise, the tilted screen on the wall projects a waterfall while the screen on the floor shows a stream of water gushing forth.
A posthumous work presented at the 3rd Gwangju Biennale (March 29-June 7, 2000). The video image continuously projects a fingerprint paired with an identification number of a person, as if alluding to the countless numbers of birth and death of human beings while each one of us bears a designated “code.”
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea
The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon was designed in 1986 by architect Kim Tae-soo.
It is a family-friendly museum that harmonizes tradition and modernity by applying the Korean traditional space composition method to modern functions.
Gwacheon is a visitor-centered art museum composed of eight exhibition halls utilizing the expertise of each field such as architecture, crafts, photography, painting, sculpture, media, and children’s art museum for children’s education and experience.
You can meet the artworks of nature in the outdoor sculpture hall, and make precious memories at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, where you can meet Korean modern art living in the indoor exhibition hall.