Installation view © Kukje Gallery

Kukje Gallery is pleased to present 《安寧 Farewell》, a solo exhibition of Park Chan-kyong from May 25 to July 2, 2017. Park’s work examines Korean society, framing the rapid socio-economic development of the past century while chronicling the often reckless pursuit of Western modernization and economic growth, through subjects including the Cold War and traditional Korean religions. The exhibition, his first solo show in Korea in five years, features thirteen new works including a video-audio work, Citizen’s Forest (2016), a collage of reproduced images of existing artworks titled Small Art History 1-2 (2014/2017), a multi-channel slide projection of photographs, Way to the Seung-ga Temple (2017), as well as serial objects Bright Stars (2017) and Seven Stars (2017), which embody the artist’s keen observations and critique of tradition.

A centerpiece of the exhibition is Citizen’s Forest, a panoramic three-channel video presented like a traditional “shan-su (landscape)” scroll painting. The work is a critical allegory of Korean modern history as well as a requiem for the many nameless people who sacrificed their lives during those tumultuous periods. Park was inspired by two works: the poem Colossal Roots (1964) by Kim Soo-young (1921 – 1968) and the painting The Lemures (1984) by Oh Yoon (1946 – 1986), the former, which embodied a modern idea that was new yet poignantly reflected on tradition, and the latter, an artwork that successfully adopted folk religions as a channel to communicate and empathize with the public.

Installation view © Kukje Gallery

In addition, 安寧 Farewell showcases the artist’s recent works underlining his ongoing quest for tradition and history in various formats. 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.

Way to the Seung-ga Temple, exhibited on the second floor, is a sequel to Citizen’s Forest and Small Art History and documents the road to the Seung-ga temple in Mt. Bukhan using an idiom of the amateur landscape photographs taken with slide film. If Citizen’s Forest is a dark and brooding atmospheric black and white video, Way to the Seung-ga Temple is colorful and picturesque. Suggesting an ideal scenery picture that is artificially staged, Park appeals to the unique sentimentalism shared by himself and many Koreans, which oscillates between “kitsch” and “Hwaeom (majestic splendor).” On the same floor, the works Bright Stars and Seven Stars bring images of shamanic cosmology with Myeongdu, tool used by shamans to decorate their shrines. In these works, the artist relates tradition to “physical memory” or “tradition-real”, rather than simply a sign or style.

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