Junebum Park, Mock-up Dam 02, 2008, Single-channel HD video, NTSC, color, sound, 10 min 10 sec © Junebum Park

Junebum Park constructs a distinctive formalism. Critics have often used the term “formalism” in discussing his work, a characterization that can be readily understood in the way three or four recurring methods consistently coincide or are selectively employed.

Yet the formalist predominance running through his practice is not confined to visual repetition; rather, it emerges from the relationships among formal elements and the ways in which they operate.

Within a flat frame secured by the deep focus of a front-facing camera, he introduces his own body—specifically, his hands. These enormous hands manipulate excavators at construction sites, erect buildings, and control the movements of cars and pedestrians at crosswalks. As a result, the work brings together the viewpoint produced by the optical apparatus and the viewpoint in which the artist or viewer becomes the subject.

Another intriguing aspect is the changing nature of the performance itself. While the performances in his representative works Parking (2001) and Crossing (2002) involve mimetic gestures akin to mime, later works such as Warp Gate (2002) and Making Apartment (2004) differ in that they progressively construct images.


Junebum Park, The Occupation 2, 2008, Single-channel HDV video, NTSC, color, sound, 5 min © Junebum Park

In this way, the combination of techniques that reveal an otherwise invisible reality through perspectival distortion with repetitive and highly practiced, yet markedly playful, bodily performances exemplifies Junebum Park’s frequent use of manipulated devices and staged direction. This can be understood as a way of engaging with scale.

Alongside this, his use of time-lapse photography, which transforms realities that go unnoticed within everyday temporality into entirely different dimensions through slight acceleration or deceleration, as well as his use of repetitive editing—as in Bicycle (2005)—can be understood as ways of engaging with the scale of time.

In tracing both the general characteristics of Junebum Park’s practice and the changes within it, we are once again led to consider the distinctiveness of his work and the continuing discussion surrounding the relationship between context and text. One possible way of categorizing his working methods is to distinguish between works in which he himself performs and those constructed through a distant, flattened perspective, as in Acrophobia (2003).

Another perspective moves beyond the recurring discussion of the relationship between his formal handling of video as a medium and the manner in which the artist intervenes, and instead considers his interest in objects themselves and the contextual dimensions of his work. From this standpoint, one begins to imagine the artist’s desires and subtle emotions.

For instance, we might consider the possibility of viewing objects of the industrial age as landscape, or the process through which things intimately close to the artist himself can nevertheless be rendered objects of contemplation. This ultimately leaves open the question of whether the flattened scale produced by the camera can be regarded as the underlying principle connecting all of his works.


Junebum Park, Puzzle 3-02, 2008, Single-channel HD video, NTSC, color, sound, 1 min 12 sec © Junebum Park

The artist has noted that the changes in his work lie in his attempt to move much closer to his own interiority. At the same time, he asks himself whether the presence of the camera—when the gaze of the optical subject within the work extends beyond mere form—might encroach upon his own territory, and he speaks of consciously regulating it so as to prevent such intrusion.

His work therefore contains an inherent tension. This tension, in turn, serves as evidence that his practice has begun to address with considerable sophistication the question of how, and to what extent, form should be handled—an especially significant question in contemporary video art.

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