Park Hyun ki

Park Hyun-ki (Korean: 박현기, 1942 – 13 January 2000) is a pioneer of Korean minimal video art. Park was born in 1942 in Osaka, Japan but fleeted to Daegu, South Korea with his family in 1945 when there were warnings of imminent nuclear bombing by the United States. Park enrolled at Hongik University with a painting major but graduated with an architecture degree in 1964. Later Park returned to Daegu in the 1970s and worked at an interior architecture firm so he could purchase equipments to produce artworks. He approached the medium of video art with an Eastern philosophical disposition, re-interpreting it as a "spiritual symbol of materialism and Western technology". Through his works, he tested the boundaries of experimentation in conceptual art, especially that of experience with perception. Instead of investigating advanced technology of video art, Park used a low-tech simplicity that "treated the television monitor and televised image as sculpture in and of themselves". He began to gain recognition as an artist at Daegu Contemporary Art Festival (established in 1974) and extended his scope by participating in international art fairs like Bienal de São Paulo (1979), Biennale de Paris (1980) and in number of exhibitions in Japan in the 1980s. After being diagnosed with stomach cancer, Park died in January, 2000 at the age of 59. Not a single work was sold during his lifetime, but he left behind his massive collection of over 20,000 artworks and items that were donated to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

Contents

• Exhibition highlights korea s first video artist park hyun ki
• Works
• References

Works

Untitled (TV Stone Tower) (1979) won the Grand Prize at Korea Art Exhibition held at Deoksugung National Museum of Art in 1980, being recognized as an important video installation that was new in the Korean art scene at the time. For his first overseas invitation to Bienal Internacional de Sao Paulo in 1979, Park installed Untitled (TV Stone Tower) for the first time abroad, along with Video Inclining Water. Untitled (TV Stone Tower) continuously appeared in his solo shows in Korea initially exhibited in Daegu Contemporary Art Festival (1979), Lee Gallery (1979), Media as Translator Performance (one-day outdoor performance) in Daegu (1982), Yoon Gallery (1984) and Soo Gallery(1985). It was eventually included in overseas exhibitions in Paris (1980) and was part of a travelling exhibition such as Korea Contemporary Art in five cities across Japan (1983), Taipei Fine Art Museum (1984) and Art Chicago (1998).

In Video Inclining Water (1979) performance art, which was also included in Bienal Internacional de São Paulo in 1979, Park tilts the video monitor in coordination to the static video image of water that is being played to give an illusion as if the monitor is filled with water. There are ten photograph editions of the performance.