Exhibition Information

			Gallery Hyundai proudly presents Park Hyunki’s solo exhibition I’m Not a Stone. This exhibition is the third solo exhibition held at the gallery following Park Hyunki: The Pioneer of Korean Video Art that commemorated the tenth anniversary of his passing (2010), and Visible, Invisible (2017) that introduced not only installation works from the early 1990’s and meditative video works but also expressionist paintings and oil stick drawings on Korean paper.

While Park Hyunki (1942-2000) is best recognized within Korea and abroad as the pioneer of Korean video art, his oeuvre is certainly not limited to video. Having studied painting and architecture in college, he worked regularly as an architect and interior designer. He experimented with and presented works in mediums as varied as sculpture, installation, prints, video, performance, painting, drawing, and photo-media. Specifically, I’m Not a Stone highlights works that represent pivotal moments within his vast creative oeuvre, revealing what lies beyond the label of “video artist.” Furthermore, it aims to affirm Park Hyunki’s art historical achievements and significance as he is yet and again reevaluated as an important figure in the history of Asian Contemporary Art. 

The ten works highlighted in I’m Not a Stone broadly encompasses Park Hyunki’s career from 1978 to 1997. Untitled (1983) transfers rocks from a riverside to the gallery space to contemplate the relationship between human, art, and nature. The site-specific installation Untitled (ART) (1986) humorously explicates his own ideas on art and architecture. Mandala (1997) edits together religious iconography and pornography using cutting edge digital technology of the time to invoke the sense of moulding to one image. These works, along with Untitled (1988), the largest piece in the “TV Stone Tower” series, have been reproduced under the auspices of the Park Hyunki Estate including family, critics and technicians that worked with the artist. This landmark exhibition marks the first time that these major works are being shown to the public since the artist’s passing. 

At the entrance of the basement floor, three small stone towers, Untitled, twinkle under the gallery lights. Displayed on the floor without pedestals, they each consist of 6 to 10 flat, oval stones of different sizes, placed one by one on top of each other to the height of an adult’s waist or knees - reminiscent of totemic stone towers built by hand at the entrance of old villages. The difference being Park builds his stone tower from both natural and manmade stones. He created manmade stones in warm hues of light pink and yellow from synthetic resin then stacked them vertically alternating with the natural stones.

Quite early in his career from 1974 to 1978, Park worked on his Sunken (몰, 沒)  series where rolls of tissue dampened with water and ink are built into cylindrical pillars or arranged on the floor in “sunken” states. Such methodologies of “stacking” are where his “Stone Tower” series extend from. After first presenting stone towers at his solo exhibition in Seoul Hwarang in 1978, the artist would continue to utilize stones as material throughout the remainder of his life. It is through this juxtaposition of natural stones that had weathered the rivers and riverbeds for countless decades and forged into coarse shapes and textures with the manmade stones of illuminated resin that the artist surveys the boundaries and relationships between nature and manmade, real and fake, material and immaterial between the objects. 

Park invests his pan-naturalist ideas of stones not only being symbols of nature but being themselves animated. In Untitled, also installed in the basement exhibition space, stones of varying sizes lie scattered on the black floor as if swept away from a certain corner of nature. In the center of the room, stones are arranged in a group as if in a circle of conversation. As if we are able to eavesdrop on that conversation, a microphone descends from the ceiling into the center of those stones. Sounds of the city infiltrate the exhibition space and are combined with the echoing sounds of visitors’ footsteps amplified with microphones and speakers thus incorporating natural stones and sounds sampled from outside and from within. This work was first presented at his solo exhibition Park Hyunki: Installation Audio & Video (1983) at Soo Gallery in Daegu alongside Untitled (TV Stone Tower). 

In the summer of 1982, Park opened a solo exhibition Media as Translators on the riverbeds of the Nakdong River in Daegu where he presented video installations, performance, and slide projections for two days and one night. The following year, he would turn this on its head and bring this natural scenery into the exhibition space creating an environment where the existence of stone as object constituted a work of art. The exhibition included street sounds and images taken by the artist as he headed to the Soo Gallery from Cubic Design Studio recorded with the camera pointed towards the ground combined with the amplified sounds of visitors stepping on the wooden floors of the gallery. The present exhibition at Gallery Hyundai will attempt a convergence of traversing time between a specific moment in Daegu during the winter of 1983 recorded in sound and the present Spring of 2021 via the medium of infinite temporality inherent in the stones born from nature. 

In one corner of the basement floor plays an archival video, documenting through photos, of Park’s performance, conducted without an audience, during that 1983 solo exhibition at Soo Gallery. With the words “I’m Not a Stone” written on his back and “stone and so forth” on his chest and stomach, the artist walks and runs naked between the mounds of stone as if searching for something. He conducts a series of acts like sitting down, crouching like a stone or leaning back against a stone. This performance dramatically reveals Park’s investigation of art as environment and the relationship between language and object, object and people, as well as primordial memories of stones and an instinctive pull towards them. In this way, the artist delivered the strong message that “he is not a stone” but “something other than stone”: a mediator between nature as symbolized by stones and human civilization within the exhibition context. Most importantly, the performance is a self-portrait of the artist himself who carried a camera to riverbeds around Korea, meticulously selecting and documenting stones to become material for his works. 

The first floor of the gallery houses the work Untitled (ART) consisting of an assemblage of wooden pieces. Originally presented at his solo exhibition at Ingong Gallery in 1986, the perception of Untitled (ART) and the surrounding space shifts according to the viewer’s perspective and location, shattering expectations of art as an object that only exists so long as it is observed. Wooden construction panels 30 cm wide and 10 cm thick are arranged vertically at more than two meters tall, obstructing the sight and movement of audiences entering the gallery. Visitors must choose their own direction to the left or right and as they move through the space, will learn one by one the composition and form of the piece that appears like the base structure of some construction site. The exhibition space features three wooden structures with irregular gaps between the panels allowing the viewers to view the space beyond or to other visitors. Each structure consists of intersecting straight and curved lines, vertical and horizontal. Visitors carefully tread the narrow interior between the three structures tracing transformations in the space as newly delineated by these structures. Yet, they will find it difficult to grasp the entire form or defined meaning of this work. As the title implies, each structure takes the shape of the letters “A, R, and T” but, due to their height, are only visible from a bird’s eye perspective. We face the irony of stumbling through wooden structures that don’t look like art, while also not being able to figure out whether their shape spells out “ART.” The audience is a crucial element envisioned by the artist as participants and performers that completes the piece. On this work, the artist emphasized, “In a place where people gather, speak, and perform, the visitors are audiences and performers simultaneously.” Untitled (ART) encompasses the artist’s philosophy of incorporating the environment around people into art that questions: “What are the boundaries and authorities of art, and who is the subject of its interpretation?” 

The second floor presents Park Hyunki’s iconic works Untitled, or “TV Stone Tower”, and the Mandala series. For Untitled, two large stones on the bottom serve as pedestal, on top of which four large cathode-ray TV monitors rest on top of each other. Each monitor displays a seam where two stacked stones meet creating the effect that the stones in all the monitors are joined seamlessly together. Untitled is a monumental work that was presented at the group exhibition Art now in Japan and Korea: Vertical and Horizontal (1988) at Seibu Art Museum’s Tskasin Hall. The work is the most towering of the "TV stone tower" series standing at over three meters tall reflecting a time when larger TVs with thinner cases and larger display screens started to appear together with the advent of remote controls. Like the stone towers of ancient times, the videos of stones stacked high looking down at us combined with the heaviness of real stones dominate the space with a presence felt even in the dark. This exhibition is the first reproduction of the work since the artist’s passing.

Usage of architectural formal languages like accumulation and construction and the harmony between the sacred and the profane reach their pinnacle in the Mandala series from Park Hyunki’s later works. The other second floor room introduces four pieces of the Mandala series from the mid-1990’s that showcase the early stages of digital video editing techniques. For this exhibition, the gallery closely consulted with Chang Heeduk, the artist’s video engineer, and Shin Yongduk, art critic and advisor to the Park Hyunki estate. These works are projecting video onto similar red-painted floral tributes used in Buddhist rituals that were used in Park’s 1997 exhibition at Kim Post Gallery in New York. Only the red light descending from the ceiling projector remains visible in an otherwise dark gallery. As the video is only visible when leaning close to the ritual tribute, audiences feel a sense of being invited to witness a secret event. With geometric Buddhist icons overlapping and replaying infinitely, particularities of images disappear only leaving behind afterimages and sounds as breathless as heartbeats. 

The Mandala series demonstrates a kind of dynamism made possible by digital editing techniques, that are far from the static meditative video works from Park’s earlier years. Short video clips, more than thirty frames per second, are weaved in over a hundred layers creating an illusion of three dimensional movement. The images forming the basis of these frames are split second clips of pornography. They were produced by capturing a single frame from original laser disk videos and then cross-editing 81 times. On top of the pornography, the artist overlaid another layer of chroma-key processed scans from books of Buddhist iconography often used as textbooks for Mandala training. Over all this are juxtaposed 81 Chinese characters from Cheonbu-kyeong scriptures (a scripture of Daejongism, a shamanistic belief system worshipping Dangun, the mythical founding father of the Korean people) explaining principles of the creation of the universe. In this way, the work is a juxtaposition of the most instinctive, secular human act with religious iconography and symbols explaining the creation of the universe and the principles of its movement. The kaleidoscopic images created from countless layers and rhythmical movement captivate the audience. Mandala is rightfully considered a quintessential example of Park’s video art, mirroring his lifelong questioning of human and nature, the source of the universe, and contemplations on its existence that form this great artist’s sublime worldview.