The MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019 presents the work of acclaimed Korean artist Park Chan-kyong, in an exhibition titled “Gathering”. Launched in 2014, the Hyundai Motor Series is a ten-year series of solo exhibitions featuring prominent Korean artists sponsored by Hyundai Motors and held annually at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA).
The programme is a catalyst for the development of the Korean art scene and supports distinctive artists by allowing them to realise new works on a large scale. The MMCA Hyundai Motor Series has contributed significantly to the development of Korean contemporary art and so far has championed the work of Lee Bul (2014), Ahn Kyuchul (2015), Kimsooja (2016), Im Heung- soon (2017) and Choi Jeonghwa (2018).
Park Chan-kyong is the sixth artist in the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series, and has attracted the attention of the domestic and international art world for his work on film, installation and photography exploring themes of the Cold War, the division of Korea, folk religion and modernity of East Asia. Born in Seoul in 1965, he majored in Painting at the College of Fine Arts there, and dedicated himself to curating exhibitions and writing about art after graduation. It was not until much later that he committed to becoming a full-time artist, and in 1997 he held his first solo show titled “Black Box: Memory of the Cold War Images”. Starting with this show, Park investigated the division of the Korean peninsula and the Cold War, their representation in the mass media and the related interests of politics and psychology.
His oeuvre mainly comprised photography and video works, such as Sets (2000), presented in the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019 exhibition, Power Passage (2004), Flying (2005) and the more recent Believe It Or Not (2018), the eigth work of PARKing CHANce, an art project led by Park Chan-kyong and his brother Park Chan-wook.
The film work Sindoan (2008) marked a turn in Park’s interest. In addition to issues he was already addressing in his work, he began directing feature films and short films on Korea’s modernity exploring Korean folk religion and shamanism. Sindoan, presented in the 2008 exhibition of the same name at Atelier Hermes, Maison Hermes Dosan Park, Seoul, explored the Sindoan region, a sacred site for numerous religions, superstitious belief systems and shamanic rites in Korean culture. Park continued to investigate these themes in later works, such as Anyang, Paradise City (2010), Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013) and Citizen’s Forest (2016).
Park also continuted to write about art, producing essays on artists and art institutions, as well as Minjung art, modernism, post-modernism and tradition. Park has been awarded the Hermès Foundation Missulsang (2004) and the Golden Bear for Best Short Film of the Berlin International Film Festival (2011). He has also curated the exhibition SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014, “Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers”.
The MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019 exhibition “Gathering” features Park Chan-kyong‘s recent film work Belated Bosal (2019), eight new works including Small Museum of Art, Fukushima, Autoradiography, Barefoot and Gallery 5, among others, and the aforementioned existing work, Sets.
Park focuses on the act of gathering in an art museum and its significance today, especially in a post-disaster era like ours (referring particularly to what has happened close to home, like the Fukushima disaster or the Sewol ferry incident). Park questions what kind of art is possible after such disasters, and suggests that museums can be “places of hope”, not just for showing art, but for people “gathering” and sharing ideas. The show thus takes the form of a series of stories within a story, like a mise en abyme narrative, and the first work encountered upon entering the exhibition is just that: a sort of reflection of the exhibition space. Entitled Small Museum of Art, the installation work is a ‘reproduction’ of a museum, presenting works curated by Park under the theme “Post-Disaster”.
Most works recall Buddhist art, and create a temple atmosphere, which anticipates in some way what visitors will experience in the coming sections of the show, while others touch upon disaster and related subjects. Park has written the wall descriptions for each work, clearly claiming his curatorial role in this endeavour. Lim Dae-geun, the curator of the exhibition, told the Korea Joongan Daily about the meaning of the work:
You see certain artworks displayed in certain ways at museums. But Park asks, aren’t museums just another institution forced onto us? Isn’t it just the authorities of scholars and researchers saying that this is the convention and this is what you should be seeing at a museum? So at this exhibition, you start the experience, consciously aware of the fact that you’re entering an exhibition and a narrative that’s been set out by someone.
The MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019 exhibition continues with more of Park Chan-kyong’s new works, such as Fukushima, Autoradiography, a video work made in collaboration with photographer Masamichi Kagaya, who worked with professor Mori Satoshi on the project Autoradiograph. Park’s work make the invisible effects of the Fukushima disaster visible, combining Kagaya’s radiographic images of the effects of radioactivity on living organisms with Park’s own landscape shots of the disaster site and its surroundings. To heigthen the feeling of correspondence and overlapping, the work is shown alongside Sets (2000), which also highlights Park’s interest in finding similarities in differing objects and finding points of conversion.
The central section of the exhibition is titled “Haein”, a Korean Buddhist word that means every object and life is marked in the sea like stamps. Here sits Water Mark, which might be seen as making an allusion to another recent disaster, the Sewol ferry incident. In Buddhism, ‘water mark’ originally refers to the sea water that reflects everything in the world. However, in Water Mark, the sea and its waves are engraved onto 16 cement panels, unmoving and solid, trapping the sea – and change – in stillness. The central concrete installation is surrounded by a few wooden maru (raised floor of a Korean traditional house) onto which visitors can sit to observe the sea. Here, the museum held lectures and discussions, in line with Park’s view that “art is the conversation about art”, and transforming the work into a place of gathering.
Continuing the exhibition is the 55-minute film Belated Bosal in which Park uses scenes taken from paintings depicting nirvana and the story of Maha Kasyapa, Gautama Buddha’s chief disciple who was late in getting to Buddha’s cremation. Park pairs these Buddhist references with others about the Fukushima disaster, such as the use of black and white negatives that evoke Fukushima’s radioactivity. The story in the film unfolds by alternating between a middle-aged woman, who wanders through the mountains, and a woman who hikes through the mountains to measure radioactive contamination.
The last part of this section includes other works such as Barefoot and Gathering, which evoke elements of the previous films. The exhibition then closes with Gallery 5, which features a 1:25 scale model of the MMCA’s Gallery 5, where the exhibition was installed. The work encourages visitors to take a step back and reconsider the museum’s space and function. The miniature is accompanied by Bertolt Brecht’s quote that reads:
How can it be drawn away from this intellectual narcotics traffic and be changed from a place of illusion to a place of practical experience.
Talking to Korean Joongang Daily, Park Chan-kyong explains that the work “zooms you out” of the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019 exhibition, taking you “far away from where you are and makes you see yourself again in a different light”. He goes on to say that “it’s up to the audience to find the narrative within the plot, and to rethink the museum as a frame of thought”. MMCA writes about Gallery 5 explaining:
The work seizes the viewers accustomed to mise en abyme frame narrative—that is to say, the custom of viewing art at museums—and forcibly pulls them out of that frame. The artist thus asks the viewers whether art can be likened to a museum. Park lets us know that viewers resisting against impositions of authority and constrictive molds—each of them awake and aware in their own distinct ways—are those invited to the meeting of this exhibition titled Gathering.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2019: Park Chan-kyong – Gathering is on view from 26 October 2019 to 23 February 2020, The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Seoul.