비디오 아티스트 박현기 회고전

A look back at video artist Park Hyun-ki

 

"Video Inclining Wate" by Park Hyun-ki [Gallery Hyundai]

If this man were alive, he might be asking for credit for the iPhone and iPod Touch's popular virtual beer drinking application.

In 1979, late video artist Park Hyun-ki captivated the audience at the Sao Paulo Biennale with the "Video Inclining Water" performance. The water image displayed on the TV monitor magically inclined from side to side according to how the artist held it.

Although overshadowed by late Paik Nam-june, this witty artist was doubtlessly one of Korea's video art pioneers.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Park's death, Gallery Hyundai organized a retrospective exhibition titled "The Pioneer of Korean Video Art Hyun-ki Park." Art insiders are showing great interest as it is a rare chance to see Park's representative works all together in a private gallery.

Including photos of the "Video Inclining Water" performance, about 20 of Park's videos and installations are on display.

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1942, Park studied painting and architecture at Hongik University in Seoul. He then went to his hometown Daegu in the early 1970s and established an interior design firm there.

A few years later in 1974, Park encountered Paik Nam-june's video art "Global Groove" at the Daegu American Cultural Center for the first time. It changed his life forever, turning him into a passionate video artist.

Park's style - with the exception of using video - became somewhat different from Paik's rather universal style.

"As crucial as it was for Park to have encountered Paik's video works, Park's approach to video and technology rather resembles the growing interests of objects and materialism in Korean art of the 1970s, East Asian philosophies and the Japanese Mono-ha Movement, which rejected Western modernism that focused on artist expression or intervention," said Kang Tae-hi, professor at Korea National University of Arts.

Among the exhibits on display, "Video Stone Towers," Park's 1978 piece which became his trademark, sets a good example of his philosophy.

Park piled up stones and furtively placed a TV set on top of them. The TV also broadcasted images of the stones, connecting itself to the stones beneath it.

"Stones embrace ancient time and space. Working with stones is a procedure to ascertain limits to occidental science," Park had said.

This simple work had earned him tickets to the 1979 Sao Paulo Biennale and 1980 Paris Biennale.

Other works found at the exhibition such as "Monitor-Fishbowl," for which the whole TV set seems like a fishbowl as it views fish swimming in one, or "TV Seesaw," for which Park balanced a stone-featuring TV on one side and a real stone on the other, demonstrate his brilliant ideas as well as his philosophies.

The exhibition runs through March 28 at Gallery Hyundai in Sagan-dong, central Seoul. For more information, call (02) 2287-3500 or visit www.galleryhyundai.com

(claire@heraldm.com)

By Park Min-young