Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts

About the Artist

Park Chan-kyong

Park Chan-kyong (b. 1965) is an artist, writer and a filmmaker based in Seoul. His subjects have extended from the Cold War to traditional Korean religious culture. He has produced media based works such as Sindoan(2008), Night Fishing(2011), Manshin(2013), Citizen’s Forest(2016), and Belated Bosal(2019). His works have been exhibited in international venues, such as National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Taipei Biennale, Yokohama Triennale, RedCat Gallery in Los Angeles, Tina Kim Gallery in New York, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, Washington,D.C., and many others. He has won various prizes including Hermès Korea Misulsang(2004), Golden Bear Prize for short films of the Berlin International Film Festival(2011). He worked as an artistic director of SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014 .

About the Artist

Park Chan-kyong

Park Chan-kyong (b. 1965) is an artist, writer and a filmmaker based in Seoul. His subjects have extended from the Cold War to traditional Korean religious culture. He has produced media based works such as Sindoan(2008), Night Fishing(2011), Manshin(2013), Citizen’s Forest(2016), and Belated Bosal(2019). His works have been exhibited in international venues, such as National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Taipei Biennale, Yokohama Triennale, RedCat Gallery in Los Angeles, Tina Kim Gallery in New York, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, Washington,D.C., and many others. He has won various prizes including Hermès Korea Misulsang(2004), Golden Bear Prize for short films of the Berlin International Film Festival(2011). He worked as an artistic director of SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014 .

Education:
1988 BFA College of Fine Art, Seoul National University, Seoul
1995 MFA Program in Photography, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California

Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2023
Park Chan-kyong: Gathering, The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, Washington D.C.

2019
MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019: Park Chan-kyong – Gathering, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

2018
Citizen’s Forest, Tina Kim Gallery, New York
PARKing CHANce 2010-2018, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea (with Park Chan-wook)*

2017
안녕 安寧 Farewell , Kukje Gallery, Seoul

2016
Park Chan-Kyong Solo Exhibition, Tina Kim Gallery, New York

2015
Pa-gyong : Last Sutra Recitation, INIVA, London

2012
Natacha Nisic & Park Chan-Kyong, Atelier Hermès, Seoul*

2010
Radiance, PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault, Seoul
Brinkmanship, REDCAT, Los Angeles (with Sean Snyder)*

2008
Sindoan, Atelier Hermès, Seoul A Mountain, Gallery Soso, Paju, Korea

2005
Flying, Ssamzie Art Space, Seoul

2003
Koreans Who Went to Germany, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

*asterisk denotes two-person show

Collections:
Tate Modern / Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / M+ Museum of Visual Culture / Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) / Kadist Foundation / Korean National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art(MMCA) / Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art / Artsonje Center / Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) / Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes / Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art

Education:
1988 BFA College of Fine Art, Seoul National University, Seoul
1995 MFA Program in Photography, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California

Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2023
Park Chan-kyong: Gathering, The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, Washington D.C.

2019
MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019: Park Chan-kyong – Gathering, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul

2018
Citizen’s Forest, Tina Kim Gallery, New York
PARKing CHANce 2010-2018, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea (with Park Chan-wook)*

2017
안녕 安寧 Farewell , Kukje Gallery, Seoul

2016
Park Chan-Kyong Solo Exhibition, Tina Kim Gallery, New York

2015
Pa-gyong : Last Sutra Recitation, INIVA, London

2012
Natacha Nisic & Park Chan-Kyong, Atelier Hermès, Seoul*

2010
Radiance, PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault, Seoul
Brinkmanship, REDCAT, Los Angeles (with Sean Snyder)*

2008
Sindoan, Atelier Hermès, Seoul A Mountain, Gallery Soso, Paju, Korea

2005
Flying, Ssamzie Art Space, Seoul

2003
Koreans Who Went to Germany, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart

*asterisk denotes two-person show

Collections:
Tate Modern / Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum / M+ Museum of Visual Culture / Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) / Kadist Foundation / Korean National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art(MMCA) / Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art / Artsonje Center / Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) / Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes / Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art

About the Works

BELATED BOSAL

HD film, four-channel sound, 55min.
2019
* Film screenings occur every hour.

This film is mainly composed of black and white negatives and close to a feature film. Belated Bosal, paired with Fukushima, Autoradiography, stimulates the audiences’ conventional conceptions and images about light, air, radioactivity and nature to the extent that they re-think all of these ideas and representations of them inversely.

A mixture of the images of mountains, Buddhist myths, a nuclear power plant and art seems to forsake the coherence of the storyline. However, this film is close to a depiction of a society that has lost its coherency. As a result, the film leads the audiences to consider the nirvana of the great saint, the road to our individual deaths and, above all, the “gatherings” that take place at the time of someone’s death.

About the Works

BELATED BOSAL

HD film, four-channel sound, 55min.
2019
* Film screenings occur every hour.

This film is mainly composed of black and white negatives and close to a feature film. Belated Bosal, paired with Fukushima, Autoradiography, stimulates the audiences’ conventional conceptions and images about light, air, radioactivity and nature to the extent that they re-think all of these ideas and representations of them inversely.

A mixture of the images of mountains, Buddhist myths, a nuclear power plant and art seems to forsake the coherence of the storyline. However, this film is close to a depiction of a society that has lost its coherency. As a result, the film leads the audiences to consider the nirvana of the great saint, the road to our individual deaths and, above all, the “gatherings” that take place at the time of someone’s death.

FUKUSHIMA, AUTORADIOGRAPHY

Film photo converted to digital image,
autoradiography, text, slide show, 24min 40sec.
2019

Collaboration with Masamichi Kagaya and Satoshi Mo.

This is a juxtaposition of images of the works of Japanese photographer Kagaya Masamichi and the botanist Mori Satoshi’s photographic images of the autoradiographs of diverse organisms and products, combined with Park Chan-kyong’s photo works taken in Fukushima in 2019.

Forming a contrast to the black and white autoradiographic images that are full of scientific precision and solemnity, Park Chan-kyong has scanned the landscape of a spring day in the post-catastrophic region. Without the black and white images that have been inserted into the flow of the scenery, the landscape simply looks like that of a small town of suburbia.
The autoradiographs and Park Chan-kyong’s photographs, alike, attempt to unravel the truths of the radioactive accident and the post-disaster reality. However, both constantly fail to reach their goals completely; the former because of the non-present-ness of its x-ray images, the latter because of the invisibleness of the radioactivity. Nevertheless, the audiences may be able to have a glimpse of the overall image of the disaster through their encounter with these images. This is the experience that the artist calls “the deadlock between images and textual information.” (MMCA)

FUKUSHIMA, AUTORADIOGRAPHY

Film photo converted to digital image,
autoradiography, text, slide show, 24min 40sec.
2019

Collaboration with Masamichi Kagaya and Satoshi Mo.

This is a juxtaposition of images of the works of Japanese photographer Kagaya Masamichi and the botanist Mori Satoshi’s photographic images of the autoradiographs of diverse organisms and products, combined with Park Chan-kyong’s photo works taken in Fukushima in 2019.

Forming a contrast to the black and white autoradiographic images that are full of scientific precision and solemnity, Park Chan-kyong has scanned the landscape of a spring day in the post-catastrophic region. Without the black and white images that have been inserted into the flow of the scenery, the landscape simply looks like that of a small town of suburbia.
The autoradiographs and Park Chan-kyong’s photographs, alike, attempt to unravel the truths of the radioactive accident and the post-disaster reality. However, both constantly fail to reach their goals completely; the former because of the non-present-ness of its x-ray images, the latter because of the invisibleness of the radioactivity. Nevertheless, the audiences may be able to have a glimpse of the overall image of the disaster through their encounter with these images. This is the experience that the artist calls “the deadlock between images and textual information.” (MMCA)

Small Art History

Photography, handwritten texts with pencil
2017

In Small Art History 1-2, Park recreates his own version of art history by reconfiguring select artworks across the ages bridging the East and the West. Using the discourses on the aesthetics of the sublime, art institutions, appropriation, photography with texts, and East Asian culture and history as an axis, he studiously avoids a chronological narrative of art history or the false categorization of the East and the West. By doing so, Small Art History 1-2 questions the underlying criteria of conventional art history while at the same time critiquing and celebrating their inherent falsehoods.

Small Art History

Photography, handwritten texts with pencil
2017

In Small Art History 1-2, Park recreates his own version of art history by reconfiguring select artworks across the ages bridging the East and the West. Using the discourses on the aesthetics of the sublime, art institutions, appropriation, photography with texts, and East Asian culture and history as an axis, he studiously avoids a chronological narrative of art history or the false categorization of the East and the West. By doing so, Small Art History 1-2 questions the underlying criteria of conventional art history while at the same time critiquing and celebrating their inherent falsehoods.