NEW YORK, NY.- Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space is presenting Pass Through the City, a solo presentation of Park Hyunki (1942–2000). Known as a pioneering figure in Korean video art, Park’s wide-ranging work encompassed video, installation, prints, painting, drawing, performance, sculpture, and a method he innovated and coined as “photo-media.” This exhibition brings to life Park’s one major performance, Pass Through the City (1981), through a set of three videos and 24 photographs alongside archival materials. The project was originally staged as a large-scale performance traversing the streets of Daegu (a city in southeast Korea) on a 50-feet-long trailer truck for forty minutes, and exhibited as a combination of large artificial stones, video playback, photography, and installation at Maekhyang Gallery—the first hybrid media project in Korean art history which dismantled boundaries between the exhibition space and the urban environment outside.

Epitomized by his frequent use of stones, inspired by a childhood memory of seeing stone towers (doltap) while fleeing the Korean War, Park took a marked interest in rediscovering a Korean aesthetic and its philosophical sensibilities through the relational effects and the collision between natural and virtual environments, and between found objects and fabricated materials. As a result, his often site-specific and ephemeral constructions test the integrative possibilities of new media such as video, as well as challenge the premise of permanence and passive looking that exists in historical Western canonical work. This ambitious exhibition, indexing a space and time that is dissonant from New York of the present, offers an alternate lineage of video art where technology is demystified and exists as one of many media embedded in the matrix of human perception and experience. Furthermore, at a moment when Korean modern and contemporary art begins to enter mainstream discourse in North America, this presentation of Park seeks to further bolster Gallery Hyundai Project Space's mission of highlighting complex and non-linear relationships between individual artists such as Park Hyunki, artistic movements, and socio-political history, offering a mirror for our present by extension.

Park Hyunki actively pursued his art practice from the mid-1970s through the 1990s, principally in Daegu, Korea. He 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. The trajectory of Park’s art practice traces the interest in objects and materiality that defined Korean contemporary art in the late 1970s; as well, his experiments adapted Eastern philosophical concepts. 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.

Park Hyunki was born in 1942 into a Korean family in Osaka, Japan, during the Japanese colonial period as the eldest of two sons and one daughter of his father, Park Joon-dong, and mother, Lee Gap-soo. 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.” Park, who evidenced a distinctive talent in art beginning in elementary school, won awards in various art competitions in the course of his school art club activities, and 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. However, his interior design business, the operation of which had allowed his art practice to continue, went bankrupt in the 1997 IMF financial crisis. Around August 1999, Park was diagnosed with terminal gastric cancer, and he passed away on January 13, 2000.

The world of Park’s œuvre spans from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1990s. He first developed his artwork in connection with the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, which ran for five editions from 1974 to 1979, alongside the festival’s other core members, Lee Kang-So, Kim Young-jin, and Choi Byung-so. In 1974, while contemplating the possibility of utilizing television’s images, he happened to see a video work by Nam June Paik and became inspired to enter the video art world. Unlike Paik, however, Park (who had not been exposed to the environment of cutting-edge technology) unfurled his video works in a decidedly post-technology direction with low-tech simplicity. His video works produced during this period 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 Maek-Hyang Gallery in real time. In 1982, he presented the video installation performance Media as Translators on the riverside in Gangjeong 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; one that arranges pieces of natural stone cut by artificial/human force within a space; and one that forms a large-scale stone tower using the actual stones and the images of the stones in the monitors. 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. During this period, he produced these works by placing a container, piece of marble, or screen on the floor and projecting images into them; these include The Mandala, in which intense colors, religious images, speed, and geometry all collide in the form of pornographic videos projected onto a static image of a mandala on a cylindrical container covered in red lacquer; Waterfall, which projects the image of water pouring down on the screen; and Presence, Reflection, which presents images of waves or nature against white marble. Tragically, Park Hyunki passed away in 2000 from gastric cancer just as he was developing a more elaborate video vocabulary. Individual Code, the artist’s affection for which was reflected in his will, was exhibited posthumously at the Gwangju Biennale, which began on March 29, 2000, following the artist’s death.

Park Hyunki was a founding member of the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, which held five editions from 1974 to 1979, and he actively developed his art practice together with artists who were primarily active in Daegu at that time. 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). His major solo exhibitions include Gallery Hyundai (Seoul, 2018, 2010), Daegu Culture and Arts Center (Daegu, 2008), Kamakura Gallery (Tyoko, 1999), Gallery Bhak (Seoul, 1999), Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art (Gyeongju, 1997), Gallery Inkong (Seoul, Daegu, 1994), Shinanobashi Gallery (Osaka, 1986), The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation (Seoul, 1985), Maek-Hyang Gallery (Daegu, 1979), among many others. He further participated in numerous group exhibitions both domestic and international, including the Busan Biennale (2016), Gwangju Biennale (2000), Paris Biennale (1980), and São Paulo Biennial (1979), 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), The Contemporary Korean Art (Total Art Museum, Seoul, 1988), Contemporary Korean Art: The Late ’70s—A Situation (traveling exhibitions in Japan including the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1983), among others.

1) Excerpt from Park Hyunki’s 1978 artist’s note, Mandala: A Retrospective of Park Hyunki (1942–2000) (Gwacheon: MMCA, Korea, 2015), 85.