Whole Earth Vision: Korean Video Artist Hyun-ki Park's art and artworks

Park Hyun-Ki

Park Hyun-Ki (1942- 2000) is 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 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.

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.

Pioneer of Korean minimal video art, Hyun-Ki Park (1942-2000) is famed for his idiosyncratic negotiations on the boundaries of experimentation in conceptual art, particularly in regards to the experience of perception.

Featuring organic elements such as stones and water, his work conveys parallels with the logic behind Marcel Duchamp’s found art, the Japanese Mono-ha Movement, as well as the Italian concept of arte povera in that all three loosely focus on the rearrangement or modification of objects not commonly considered to be art. They function as an artistic intervention, challenging pre-existing perceptions as well as institutional hierarchies in art.

There are some of Park’s seminal projects to convey the gravity of his contributions to the foundation of Korean experimental video art.