Park Hyun-ki

rdf:langString Park Hyun-ki

rdf:langString 朴炫基

rdf:langString Pak Hyŏn'gi

rdf:langString 박현기

rdf:langString Bak Hyeon-gi

rdf:langString Park Hyun-ki (Korean: 박현기, 1942 – January 13, 2000) is best known as a pioneer of Korean video art. Although Park lacked technological training in video and initially felt dismayed that he could not create sophisticated effects, Park purposefully chose to make his work low tech; his video artworks often display still images or document performed actions, all the while eschewing complex editing. For Park, video was just one technological instance in the histories of innovation and of exploration of the relationship between reality and illusion. In particular, Park approached the medium of video art through an Eastern worldview, and he saw video as embodying the spiritual aspects of both advanced technology and materialism.Across many of his works, Park perturbed the boundaries between the real and the virtual, to the extent that he revealed how virtual images were informed by the real, and how the virtual and the real could become interconnected spaces within the context of his artworks. According to the scholar Jung E. Choi, Park aimed to reconcile what TV/video signified as a medium (i.e., “technology, illusion, and materiality”) and what it could convey (i.e., “nature, perception, and materiality”). Park is best known for his video artworks, yet performance, installation, and photography also marked major veins of his artistic practice. The curator Kim Inhye has observed that—from bringing rocks into a gallery and running nude amidst them to stacking bricks, cutting railroad ties, and erecting planks—Park pursued an array of artistic mediums in highly experimental ways. Nonetheless, as Kim has argued, Park dedicated the breadth of his practice to creating artworks that not only embodied Korean tradition, but also activated the ability of Korean tradition to relate to the human condition and to people from all over the world. As the art historian Yeon Shim Chung has observed, posthumous retrospective exhibitions on Park Hyun-ki (namely, Park Hyunki: Presence and Reflection in 2008 at the Daegu Arts and Culture Center and Hyun_ki at Gallery Hyundai in 2010) have propelled a fresh wave of recent research on Park’s practice. To date, the largest scale of these recent exhibitions was presented in 2015 by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; the exhibition included over 1000 artworks and archival ephemera on Park Hyun-ki.