Park Chan-kyong: Gathering

For Gathering, Park Chan-kyong’s MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019 exhibition, the artist created eight new works within the structure of a mise en abyme. Installed near the entrance, Small Museum of Art functioned as the exhibition’s self-reflective frame and explored whether or not our familiarity with art history and museums stems from an artificially indoctrinated framework. Also on view was Belated Bosal, a 55-minute film that paired the religious event of Siddartha Gautama’s nirvana with the Fukushima nuclear accident. Park used black-and-white negatives to evoke Fukushima’s radioactivity while following the stories of two women: one wandering through the mountains and one hiking to measure radioactive contamination. Also centered on Fukushima was Fukushima, Autoradiography, which projected photographs taken in a village hit by the Fukushima nuclear disaster with Masamichi Kagaya’s autoradiographs that visualize radioactivity. The piece was presented alongside Sets and together the two highlighted Park’s ability to see similarities in different objects and find points of connection. At the center of the exhibition was Water Mark, which featured cement panels engraved with different styles of waves with wooden maru (the raised flooring in a traditional Korean house). Lectures and discussions about the exhibition took place throughout the run of the show as “gatherings” that reflected Park’s belief that “art is the conversation about art.”

Park Chan-kyong (born in Seoul, Korea, in 1965) is known for his film, installation, and photography that considers the Cold War, division of Korea, folk religion, and modernity of East Asia. Park majored in painting, but after graduation focused on writing about and curating exhibitions. His first solo exhibition, Black Box: Memory of the Cold War Images, was at the Kumho Museum of Art in 1997. In 2008 he began directing short and feature-length films on modernity in Korea, Korean folk religion, and shamanism. Park was awarded the Hermès Foundation Missulsang (2004), and the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the Berlin International Film Festival (2011). He also curated the exhibition Ghosts, Spies and Grandmothers for SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul (2014).