PARK HYUNKI
Park Hyunki is widely known as a pioneer of Korean video art, but his art practice was not limited to video; in fact, his works spanned a wide range of fields including sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, and photo-media. Park approached video as a new object and incorporated experiments on materiality utilizing natural and artificial stone, railroad ties, and glass. Through his experimental practices at sites including cities, ponds, rivers, and riversides where he searched for images of ourselves, the past, and nature, he strove to approach the essence of art and nature and, ultimately, transcendental spirituality. Park Hyunki created a type of “video-installation” work that juxtaposes natural objects with artificial videos; in doing so, he gave form to a singular world of video art that is both spiritual and contemplative.
His video works produced in 1970s function primarily as couplings of objects and devices that reflect images of these objects, and the works emphasize the relational aspects of objects and monitors. Such works include TV Stone Tower (1979), where TVs that broadcast images of stones are stacked between a pile of stones, together attaining a sense of harmony between the image and reality, and Monitor-Fishbowl (1979), where the exterior of the TV becomes a fishbowl, and the image of fish in the TV creates the illusion that fish are swimming inside. In 1981, Park conducted the performance Pass through the City where he went through Daegu’s city center with a large artificial stone that had a mirror attached to it and documented the reaction of onlookers in moving images and photographs; the images reflected in the mirror were displayed on a monitor in the Gallery in real time. In 1982, he presented the video installation performance Media as Translators on the riverside in near Daegu for two days and one night, an undertaking that required considerable physical and human mobilization and succinctly presented the artist’s views on nature, video media, humans, and civilization.
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Park employed a mixture of construction materials, natural stones, glass, railroad ties, and monitors to expose unfamiliar combinations and collisions between the nature and artificial. These include a work that constructs a space out of wooden boards or bricks, which are architectural materials. Additionally, he physically cut natural materials and incorporated artifacts into them in order to explore the contrast, harmony, and balance between these elements, for example, by spreading railroad ties on the floor; cutting one side of a long railroad tie and inserting a stone or monitor into the tie; and cutting a natural stone and inserting a plane of glass into the newly created void. In addition, during this period, he introduced his own photography technique that he called “Photo-media” and produced drawings on mulberry hanji paper that look as if they have been scribbled with oil sticks.
In the 1990s, owing to the development of video editing programs and the active assistance by his technician, Park further turned his focus to video works, presenting works like The Blue Dining Table (1995), The Mandala (1997), Waterfall (1997), Presence, Reflection (1999), among others.
Untitled 1978, Stone, resinoid
The real stones and artificial stones made by glass are stacked like a tower.
Untitled (TV Stone Tower)
Exhibited in the 15th São Paulo Art Biennial. The stone and the TV screening video of the stone are stacked like a tower.
Installation view of Mandala: A Retrospective of Park Hyunki(1942-2000), National Museum of Modern and Contermporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea, 2015 MMCA Art Research Center Collection (Digital Image)
Performance at the solo exhibition Park Hyunki: Installation Audio & Video, Soo Gallery, Daegu, Korea, 1983. The artist walked and ran naked in the gallery filled with lots of stones with “I’m not a stone” written on his back.
Untitled (TV Fishbowl)
1979, Single-channel video, color, silent; monitor, Wood antique stool, 109×57×43cm The TV became a fishbowl as the video recording fish was played on the screen.
Untitled (TV Fishbowl)
1984, Two-channel video, color, silent; monitor, stone, Dimensions variable
I don’t see technology as romantic as the first generation of video artist, who built a monument of technology with grand cutting-edge devices or boasting video’s magical trick.
And I have no awe of technology as the all-around wonder machine of the 20th century.
I only hope the technology transforms humanly in my hand.
Park HyunkiInclining Water, Performance, 1979
As much as the monitor is inclined, the water in the screen is also inclined diagonally.
Work 1, Media as Translators performance
Park Hyunki had Media as Translators on the riverside in Gangjeong near Daegu from 26 to 27 June, 1982.
He presented six performances and photographed the processes and consequences of them.
Sculpture
2019, Mixed media on mulberry Hanji paper, 202 × 142 cm
Work 3, Media as Translators performance
Work A, Pass through the City, 1981
Monumental works were presented at Park Hyunki’s solo exhibition held at Maek-Hyang Gallery. The exhibition consisted of three works - Work A, a large artificial stone with a mirror attached to it tore down the Gallery’s wall and filled the whole space; Work C, a small stone with mirror showing a view of city contrasts to nature; Work B, a documentation of the reaction of onlookers in moving images and photographs while the artist passes through the center of Daegu with a huge artificial stone with attached mirror on the 16 meters long trailer.
Work C, Pass through the City, 1981
Work B, Pass through the City, 1981
Documented photographs of Pass through the City
I decided to approach “our” perspectives by broadly categorizing them first as visible, and second as spiritual. And the stone tombs, menhirs, temples, mortuaries, danggol (shamans), uncanny experiences, and many historical ruins and villages that I organically experienced as a child, the spiritual consciousness of the village elders who once lived in them, the thoughts that our forbearers had, and especially their aesthetic consciousness: it was, above all, enjoyable to find the spirit that I had previously failed to acknowledge and its visible manifestations.
Untitled 1987/2018, Single-channel video, color, silent; monitors, stone, Dimensions variable
Park Hyunki
Untitled (TV Seesaw)
1984/2016, Single-channel video, color, silent; monitor, stone, steel plate, Dimensions variable
Untitled
1980, 16mm film, black and white, silent; video projector
The video shows a performance in which the artist ran for 2 minutes and 47 seconds constantly and flopped down in the end.
MMCA Art Research Center Collection (Digital Image)
Untitled, 1980, Performance photography
Installation view of solo exhibition held at The Korean Culture & Arts Foundation, 1985 The gallery was divided into several spaces by building brick structures.
Untitled (ART)
Installation work that the wooden construction panels divide the gallery space. The shape of the letters, “A, R and T” are observed from a bird’s eye perspective.
I never forget the stone cairns at Seongangdang at Gogaet-maru that I happened upon fleeing from the Korean War.
From the front to back of the line of refugees, people passed on a note to pick up stones and throw them towards mounds of stones, small and big.
The mounds were like the tombs of deities or like their houses, strange places that linger in my memory as something that transcends imagination.
I am still vividly drawn to revisit the site, as if a part of our spirits hide somewhere there.
Park HyunkiUntitled 1993-94, Oil stick on Korean paper, 157 × 104 cm
Untitled 1993-94, Oil stick on Korean paper, 104 × 79 cm
Untitled 1993, Single-channel video, color, silent; monitor, wood, stones
Mandala
1997, Single-channel video, color, sound; video projector, khantok
The Mandala Series #007, 1998
The Mandala Series: Immolation #1, 1997
The Mandala Series #007, 1998
The Mandala Series: Chaos #2, 1997
The Mandala Series: Chaos #2, 1997
Mandala
Installation view of Park Hyunki - VisibIe, InvisibIe, Gallery Hyundai, 2017
Park HyunKi : Videos and Objects
Professor, Korea National University of Arts
The artist Park HyunKi is one of the luminaries in the history of Korean modern art, yet the research on his artistic career still remains a work in progress. Although Park is widely known as a precursor to video art in Korea for developing his own artistic vocabulary with the use of then a rare medium of video, the details of his experimental oeuvre is relatively unknown to the public and his work has yet to be the focus of extensive studies in the academia. The public’s acceptance of video art as a vital form of artistic expression spread over the years as the regularly held media art biennial promoted its name while the country’s technology saw a dramatic advancement. However, the study of the artist who has initiated it all has not seen much of a progress. In this context, the upcoming retrospective at Gallery Hyundai marks the second retrospective since Park, Hyun-Ki: Presence & Reflection (2008) held in Daegu and the first one ever to be held in Seoul. Here, I wish to introduce his oeuvre in attempt to elicit the interest in the experimental works of Park HyunKi .
Born in Osaka in April, 1942, Park attended HongIk University, where he started out as a Painting major but earns his degree in Architecture. Upon the completion of his degree in the early 70s, the artist spends a few years managing an interior design firm called Cubic Design in his hometown of Daegu. All the while, Park continues to delve in the creative process while constantly engaging in the dialogue on modern art with the artistic circle of Daegu, which included the artist Lee Kangso. Park’s reputation as an artist began to spread as he participated in the annual Daegu Contemporary
Taehi Kang Untitled (Photo-media) 1992, Oil stick on photo-media, 56.5 × 46.5 cmArt Festival from 1974 to 1979. The fair was a successful gathering place for important Korean artists of the period as well as international artists engaging in Process Art, Performance, Video, Film, and Installation works. Such vibrant art scene and openness to the new media art may have played a vital role in Park’s selection of video as an important medium to his work.
The year of 1974, in which the Daegu Fair first opened, also marks an important turning point in the history of video art in Korea and Park HyunKi ’s artistic career. Having been aware of the trend in the international art scene, Park was beginning to consider the possibility of working with television images when he first encountered Nam-June Paik’s Global Groove (1973) and other single channel video work that compiled the performance of Merce Cunningham at the library of Daegu American Cultural Center. Park’s discovery eventually inspires him to further delve into video art. The period also proved to be an important one to NamJune Paik’s career as his electronic art pieces began to receive the recognition as “moving sculptural works.” Video art as the newly emerging genre of art instigated many heated debates up to the mid 70s. The critics continuously questioned the validity of discussing television as a medium of art and subsequently around 1974, a big symposium put an end to the discussion and the establishment of video art as a valid genre became more or less official. Contrary to the “official recognition” it had received, video art as a genre continued to suffer the unpopularity for the next couple of decades due to the technical and economical problems it posed.
At Korean Contemporary Fine Art Exhibition–The Stream of the ‘70s, Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 1984
Despite the difficult situation, Paik managed to achieve a wide-spread success as a founder of video art. One of the pieces he introduced in 1974 was Video Garden —an installation work that juxtaposed the theme of nature and man-made materials.
We must be careful, however, not to overemphasize the shadow of Paik’s influence on Park HyunKi ’s work. As crucial as it was for Park to have encountered Paik’s video works, Park HyunKi ’s approach to video and technology rather resembles the growing interests of objects and materiality in Korean art of the 70s, East Asian philosophies, and Japanese Mono-ha movement, which rejected the Western modernism that focused on artist expression or intervention. At the center of Mono-ha movement was Ufan Lee, whose sculptural series Relatum is comprised of stones that represent an element of nature and artificially processed iron plates. Lee states that, in East Asian philosophy, a rock symbolizes an element that sustains the balance in nature, whereas an iron plate is taken from nature and transformed as a conceptual product of human. Thus, Lee’s use of an iron plate that consists of both artificiality and a touch of nature is intended to act as a stepping stone between a rock and a human being.
itself completely from nature. An art work, thus, must inevitably encompass such contradictory relationship between untouched and engaged, and doing and non-doing.” Stone is also a persistent element in Park HyunKi ’s work. Throughout his entire oeuvre, stone remains as a crucial medium, onto which he embedded artificial stones such as glass or resin (stone towers from 197778); it later leads to his most representative video stone tower works from 1978, where he began to combine stones with TV monitors. According to Park, a stone, as a part of nature, encompasses the primitive time and place, and thus, his stone work was in part a self-expression, as well as a result of a process that led to the realization of our stance against the limitations of Western science and technology. By juxtaposing the found objects from nature, such as stones or wooden pieces, with video images depicting the scenes of nature, Park contrasted reality and fiction, nature and culture. In TV Seesaw (1984), Park showcased the most realistic representation of Ufan Lee’s ‘law of contradiction’ by creating a seesaw out a stone and iron plate and putting a big stone on one side of the seesaw and positioning the monitor containing the image of a stone on the other end.
In the artist’s own words: “One can call a pebble on the riverbank a piece of art work, but such has a danger of losing the creative touch and giving itself up to a work of nature; one can also rub a stone and transform it into an artificial shape but such has a tendency of being ‘too artistic’ and detaching
If Park was influenced by Mono-ha and Ufan Lee just like many of the other artists from the 70s, and if the growing interest in object and environment led to the Post-Minimalist tendencies, the art scene in Japan from the same period serves as a good reference point. In 1970, the 10th Tokyo Biennale was held under the title of “Between Man and Matter” as a gathering of artists engaging in Earth
Poplar Event, performed at The 3rd Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, 1977 The artist scattered and drew the shape of the shadow of eight poplar trees with lime powder at the white sand beach of Nakdonggang riverside.Untitled (Reflection Series), 1979
The mirror was installed at a right angle and the reflection of water flow was photographed.
By juxtaposing TV monitors with stones, his use of video served as a conceptual key to comment on the limitations of Western science. He often disregarded the editing features of a video in order to capture the crude combination of nature and the man-made as seen by an anonymous observer, and also to accentuate the contrast between reality and illusion.
an illusion as if the monitor was filled with water.
works, Process Art, and Arte Povera. Whether Park had been aware of these artistic movements is unknown but one can only presume the influence it must have had on his career, as Japan was often an important source of information on the international art scene to many Korean artists at the time.
Park’s expectation for technology art soon dissipates, as he realized the technical limitations of his own experience in the field unlike Paik. Consequently, he resolves to free his video work from technology and finds his own vocabulary by the means of “low-technology,” which was then employed to capture our landscape and other areas such as stone tombs, menhir, and tunnels.
The visual resemblance of Park’s Video Stone Towers to Japanese Mono-ha artist, Sekine Nobuo’s stone sculpture Phase of Nothingness (空相) from 1970 is also an interesting point of examination, yet the latter embeds plastic rod in the rocks to give an illusion of overcoming the gravity, thus essentially distinguishing the two works of art. Park HyunKi receives a major recognition through Video Stone Towers, which subsequently earns him the ticket to participate in Sao Paulo Biennale of 1979 and Paris Biennale of 1980. His first ever video work was from 1977 where he recorded the wavering water in a bowl. Created in Japan, Monitor-Fishbowl (1979) gives an illusion of representing a monitor as a fishbowl. On the other hand, at the 4th Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, Park captures the screen that gets distorted in the shape of an illuminator. For the 5th Festival’s Reflection Series, he installs a mirror near Nakdong River and captures the reflection of the water surface along with the surrounding environment. The artist also showed his interest in Performance art, which led him to perform Video Inclining Water (1979) at Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil. In the performance, Park tilted the video monitor in coordination to the video image of water that was being played to give
Park’s fascination with stones persisted throughout the 80s as he experimented with various ways to incorporate them in his work. The variations involved projecting images of stones onto a bigger rock, installing video stone towers or monitors in nature outside of the confined gallery space, and increasing the number of monitors than rocks in his video stone tower series. His artistic territory extended even further in Pass through the City (1981), for which the artist attached a mirror onto a giant, artificial rock and loaded it on the truck to drive through the city while recording the response of the passersby on the streets. The video image was later screened at a gallery space on a monitor. In the 90s, his so-called ‘wooden hand’ series (1991-93) incorporated an elongated wooden piece that was cut into five branches similar to a shape of a hand. The artist inserted stones to the gaps in between and attached a small monitor on the side. The artist would stand in front of the work as a part of the piece, as if to indicate the work as his self-portrait of his life-long devotion for investigating the relationship among objects, monitors, and stones.
In the last ten years before the artist’s passing away, Park began to utilize video projections. The Blue Dining Table from 1997 was a rarely political piece that consisted of a giant plate on a table containing plaster casts of his body parts onto which he projected the documentary clips of Gwangju Incident and 4.19 Revolution. Following works included Mandala Series (1997), where
a pornographic imagery was projected onto a cylindrical lacquer ware and Falling Water (1997), where an image of falling water was projected to a large screen board. In Presence & Reflection, images of water ripples and nature reflected on a small fountain were projected on a white marble. Park states that a Mandala refers to ‘a wheel of time’ that embodies change and movement. The bold color, abstract images, religious connotations, and reference to speed and movement seem to show the various directions his work could have taken had he not passed away at the height of his short-lived career.
Even from this brief review of Park’s career, one can see the experimental nature of the artist in his decision to take video art to the opposite direction from technology. As a result, his work rejected the theatrical and narrative quality of video and focused on the contemplation of materials and perception. His later video projection works maintained the same conceptual basis perhaps due to his obstinate disbelief in Western science. He attempted to preserve our tradition through the medium of video without getting technology in the way and thus, it seems more accurate to categorize his work as his own unique style rather than labeling it as a ‘Korean’ approach. His persistent and solitary effort to engage in video art was indeed a revolutionary one in his time and the contribution he has made to Korean video art is truly immeasurable.
Untitled (TV Stone Tower) 1982, Single-channel video, color, silent; monitor, stone, Dimensions variable
Untitled 1987, stone
The flagstones were attached to the wall in the shape of a staircase and the real staircase was placed in front of it as if it had fallen off the wall.
Park Hyunki was born in 1942 into a Korean family in Osaka, Japan, during the Japanese colonial period . Shortly before Korea’s liberation in 1945, his family returned to their hometown, Daegu, and settled there to live.
On June 25, 1950, the Korean War broke out, and Park, who was then a second-grader in elementary school, witnessed a scene where refugees fleeing the city sent a signal backwards through the crowd, instructing those behind them to pick up stones, place the stones into piles, and build stone towers in order to pray for safe passage as the evacuation procession filled an uphill mountain pass. This instance later led him to become immersed in seeking out his forebearers’ aesthetic consciousness and spiritual imprints in stone tombs, menhirs, and temples, an interest that was at odds with his Western-style education, which emphasized “eradicating superstitions.” in 1961 he enrolled in the Western painting department at Hongik University. He later transferred to the department of architecture, from which he graduated in 1967, and then returned to Daegu in the early 1970s to found his own interior design firm.
Park was able to focus on works of a more experimental nature in his artistic activities thanks to the economic stability he gained from his business. He played a leading role in the founding of the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, which began in 1974 with Lee Kang-So, Kim Youngjin, and Choi Byung-so. Park participated in the São Paulo Biennial in 1979 and the Paris Biennale in 1980, and his works were well received at both international events. This exposure made it possible for him to expand his international perspective by engaging in numerous solo exhibitions in Japan in the 1980s and in active exhibitions abroad, including in Malaysia and Taiwan. In line with the trajectory of the art world toward video in the 1990s, he focused in earnest on video as a medium and produced a number of video-based works. Around August 1999, Park was diagnosed with terminal gastric cancer, and he passed away on January 13, 2000.
He held his first solo exhibition at Seoul Gallery in 1978. In 2015, fifteen years after his death, Park’s major retrospective exhibition Mandala: A Retrospective of Park Hyunki (1942–2000), which presented his œuvre and rich archival collection, was organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA). He further participated in numerous group exhibitions both domestic and international, including the Busan Biennale (2016), Gwangju Biennale (2000), as well as Refocusing on the Medium: The Rise of East Asian Video Art (OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), Shanghai, 2020), Korean Video Art from 1970s to 1990s: Time Image Apparatus (MMCA, 2019), Korean Historical Conceptual Art from the 1970-80s: pal-bang-mi-in (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2011), International Video Art Festival (The National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, 1990), Contemporary Korean Art: The Late ’70s—A Situation (traveling exhibitions in Japan including the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1983), among others.
After opening its doors as “Hyundai Hwarang” on April 4th, 1970 in Insadong, Seoul, Gallery Hyundai has been leading movements in the art world since boldly introducing contemporary art to what was at the time an old paintings and calligraphy-oriented gallery world. It was through Gallery Hyundai that Lee Jung Seob and Park Soo-Keun, now accepted as the “Korean people’s artists”, received spotlight. It also had been contributing to expanding the basis of Korean abstract art, organizing exhibitions with masters Kim Hwanki, Yoo Youngkuk, Yun Hyong-keun, Kim Tschang-Yeul, Park Seo-bo, Chung Sang-Hwa, Kim Guiline and Lee Ufan long before the Dansaekhwa boom.
Following the 1980’s, Gallery Hyundai adapted to developments in the international art world by opening exhibitions of international masters like Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Christo and JeanClaude Denat de Guillebon. From 1987, it would participate in Chicago Art Fair as the first Korean gallery to be included in an international art fair to introduce Korean art to global audiences. Including Nam June Paik’s performances and video art, many works by headliners of Korean experimental art such as Quac Insik, Seung-taek Lee, Park Hyunki, Lee Kang-So, Lee Kun-Yong were connected to wider audiences through Gallery Hyundai. To this day, it is always discovering and introducing emerging and mid-career artists like Minjung Kim, Moon Kyungwon, Jeon Joonho, Seulgi Lee, Yang Jung Uk, Kim Sung Yoon, Kang Seung Lee.
Art magazines Hwarang and Hyundai Misul, each first printed in 1973 and 1988, remain vivid documentations of their contemporary art scenes. In addition to two spaces Gallery Hyundai and Hyundai Hwarang in Samchung-ro, Seoul, it is also operating a showroom in Tribeca, New York. www.galleryhyundai.com
Installation view of Untitled at Park Hyunki: Installation Audio & Video, Soo Gallery, Daegu, 1983