Park Hyunki: Pass Through the City

Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space is pleased to announce Pass Through the City, a solo presentation of Park Hyunki (1942–2000). Known as a pioneering figure in Korean video art, Park’s wide-ranging work encompassed video, installation, prints, painting, drawing, performance, sculpture, and a
method he innovated and coined as “photo-media.” This exhibition brings to life Park’s one major performance, Pass Through the City (1981), through a set of three videos and 24 photographs alongside archival materials. The project was originally staged as a large-scale performance traversing the streets
of Daegu (a city in southeast Korea) on a 50-feet-long trailer truck for forty minutes, and exhibited as a combination of large artificial stones, video playback, photography, and installation at Maekhyang Gallery—the first hybrid media project in Korean art history which dismantled boundaries between the
exhibition space and the urban environment outside.

Epitomized by his frequent use of stones, inspired by a childhood memory of seeing stone towers (doltap) while fleeing the Korean War, Park took a marked interest in rediscovering a Korean aesthetic and its philosophical sensibilities through the relational effects and the collision between natural and virtual environments, and between found objects and fabricated materials. As a result, his often site-specific and ephemeral constructions test the integrative possibilities of new media such as video, as well as challenge the premise of permanence and passive looking that exists in historical Western canonical work. This ambitious exhibition, indexing a space and time that is dissonant from New York of the present, offers an alternate lineage of video art where technology is demystified and exists as one of many media embedded in the matrix of human perception and experience. Furthermore, at a moment when Korean modern and contemporary art begins to enter mainstream discourse in North America, this presentation of Park seeks to further bolster Gallery Hyundai Project Space’s mission of highlighting complex and non-linear relationships between individual artists such as Park Hyunki, artistic movements, and socio-political history, offering a mirror for our present by extension.

About the artist
Park Hyunki was born in 1942 into a Korean family in Osaka, Japan, during the Japanese colonial period. Shortly before Korea’s liberation in 1945, his family returned to their hometown, Daegu. In 1961, he enrolled in Hongik University in Seoul, initially majoring in painting and later transferring to architecture, and graduated in 1967. He returned to Daegu in the early 1970s to start his own interior design firm. There, Park played a key role in founding the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, which ran for five editions from 1974 to 1979.
In 2015, fifteen years after his death, Park’s major retrospective, Mandala: A Retrospective of Park Hyunki (1942–2000), was organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA). His solo exhibitions were held at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul; Daegu Culture and Arts Center; Kamakura Gallery, Tokyo; Gallery Bhak, Seoul; Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Gyeongju; Gallery Inkong, Seoul and Daegu; Shinanobashi Gallery, Osaka; The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, Seoul; and Maekhyang Gallery, Daegu, among many others. He also participated in numerous group exhibitions worldwide including Only the Young: Korean Experimental Art 1960s–1970s (traveling MMCA, Seoul; Guggenheim, New York; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s (traveling MMCA, Seoul; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and National Gallery Singapore), as well as presentations at the Busan Biennale; Gwangju Biennale; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art; International Video Art Festival at The National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; Total Art Museum, Seoul; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; Paris Biennale; and São Paulo Biennial. His representative works are housed in prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; MMCA, Gwacheon; Seoul Museum of Art; Daegu Art Museum; and the Busan Museum of Art.