The spinning top now turns before me
like a sage from thousands of years ago.
Though it saddens me to think of it,
as if to say we must not cry
for the common power to spin on our own—
both you and I.
—Kim Soo-young, from Play of the Moon Country
 


Structure of the Exhibition

From May 25 to July 2, 2017, Park Chan-kyong held a solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery K2. This solo show, the first in five years, presented thirteen new works. These included the three-channel video-audio work Citizen’s Forest (2016), which mourns anonymous victims while invoking Korea’s turbulent modern and contemporary history, including the Sewol Ferry Disaster; Small Art History (2014/2017), which critically reflects on the limitations of autonomous art historical writing within Korean institutional art and proposes new subjective and creative paradigms; and The Way to Seunggasa (2017), which was presented as a slide projection and functions as a follow-up work to the two mentioned above. In addition, Bright Star (2017) and Chilseongdo (2017), produced in collaboration with Kim Sang-don, were installed between Citizen’s Forest and The Way to Seunggasa.

At a glance, the movement of the audience through the exhibition seems to follow a simple linear path, connecting the entrance and exit. However, the cycle that guides viewers from the first floor to the second and then back to the first is not as straightforward as it appears. The entrance and exit are located on the same level (the first floor), but the artist’s archive is spread out at the entrance, creating a subtle “twist” that may lead one to feel they must begin again there. It could be called a misaligned circulation.

The archive—serving as the trigger for the artist’s inspiration and a litmus test for examining the processes behind his works—can be either viewed first or passed by altogether. If another viewer happens to be perusing the archive, one might find oneself taking time to “appreciate” the unfamiliar plates attached to the wall. Here, “appreciate” refers to its original Korean meaning: “thoughts that arise from feelings.” The images Park has presented are indeed rich enough to evoke such appreciation.

Small Art History, written by Park Chan-kyong himself, is a complex and humorous narrative about the colonial nature of the art institutions of Korea and Asia. Instead of presenting a chronological or East/West-divided account of art history, he reconfigures major artworks from East and West, ancient and modern, based on subjective perspectives and methodologies—traversing axes such as horizontal/vertical structures, the aesthetics of the sublime, the museum, art and writing, East Asian culture, and politics. His motivation stems from the realization that art history cannot be properly narrated within Korea’s colonially derived modernity. Yet he does not merely offer a critique, but asks instead: “Then why don’t we each write our own?

Though they may be clumsy, problematic, and minor, if we do not present them as official doctrines but as subjective and heretical forms, wouldn’t that make for a far more interesting art history?” Rather than proposing another unified art history, he is imagining an infinite expansion of subjective art histories. Park states1):

“Before judging the rights and wrongs of modernity, we need to relativize modernity itself. We must look at it from a distance. If we remain immersed in it, and fail to defamiliarize it, we’ll find it difficult to imagine new societies or new forms of art.”


Several of the plates and their sources that comprise Small Art History are as follows. They are not listed in the order in which they were attached on the wall but are images discussed in this text:

- Kim Hong-do, Buddhist Chant Master, 20.8×28.7cm, late 18th–early 19th century, Kansong Art Museum
- Kim Hong-do, Watching the Moon at the Altar, 98.2×48.5cm, 18th century, National Museum of Korea
- Kim Hong-do, Military Immortal Crossing the River, Ink and color on paper, 26.2×48.8cm, 18th century, National Museum of Korea
- Hieronymus Bosch, Ascent of the Blessed, Oil on panel, 80.5×30.5cm, 1490, Palazzo Ducale, Venezia
- Written by Ma Changyi, translated by Joh Hyun-joo, Illustrated Commentary on the Classic of Mountains and Seas, Vol. II, Other Thoughts Publishing, 2013, p. 854, “Section 6-6: Kingdom of Chest-Bearing People”
- Min Joung-ki, Ten Thousand Pinnacles of Mount Geumgang, Oil on canvas, 324×333cm, 1999
- Min Joung-ki, Embrace, Oil on canvas, 112×145cm, 1981
- Prefaced by Seo Dae-seok, History of Shamans, Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, Seoul National University, 2005. Plate titled “Back Shrine” at the end of the book
- Jeon Sang-guk, Lee Ho-chul, Moon Sun-tae, Kim Won-il, The Korean War in 100 Scenes That Shaped Me, Noonbit Publishing, 2006 (1st edition), p. 89
- Oh Yoon, The Lemures, Oil on canvas, 69×462cm, 1984. The artist wrote below the painting, “Above the procession of ghosts float wandering souls—spirits who, even as ghosts, could not belong to the society of ghosts.”
- Sindoan, source of this black-and-white photograph is not stated. Caption reads: “Sindoan, 1978, during Park Chung-hee regime’s anti-superstition campaign—a shaman burns a Mountain God painting.”
- Portrait of Filial Piety, no source indicated. This type of folk painting was widely used to create a painted shrine with space for ancestral memorial tablets. Also called Portrait of a Shrine. The one shown is an anonymous work from the 19th century, captioned “a window to meet ancestors.”
- Chae Yong-shin, Portrait of Songho, 90×49cm, date unknown (early 20th century), private collection

At the far right corner of the first-floor exhibition space stood a telex machine on a pedestal covered in leopard print fabric. The telex had a slide tray and deer antlers mounted on its head. It was clearly a metamorphosed telex. Then what is the “body” of this transformed figure? After reaching the telex, the audience could loop back and re-examine Small Art History, proceed to the archive by the entrance, or walk behind the wall to view Citizen’s Forest. Upon exiting Citizen’s Forest, one again encounters the archive and can ascend to the second floor. On the second floor, viewers encounter Bright Star, Chilseongdo, MoonWalk, and finally The Way to Seunggasa in sequence.



Thoughts Stirred in the Heart

The gallery was a gut-dang—a shamanic space—where the aesthetics of conjuring and ritual intertwined, a vessel of prajñā pāramitā ferrying one from the saha world to the Pure Land.² When the world and its people are not at peace due to calamity, they are in a state of mi-an (未安)—unpeace—and thus a gut must be performed.³ When peace returns, an-rak (安樂) is achieved, and that is the realm of purity.⁴ However, the circumambulating walk from the first floor to the second and back again, like a pilgrimage or participation in a dwitjeon (back shrine) ritual yard, was mi-an. Because the ghosts boarding the prajñā pāramitā vessel and the shamanic gut-dang had not yet attained peace.

The shaman with antlers—the great deer shaman of the gut-dang—was the slide TV. It is said that the Buddha gave his first sermon at the Deer Park (ṛṣipatana), but another way to see it is that a deer-shaman gave the sermon there—thus, ṛṣipatana as a place of shamanic revelation. The message of the deer-shaman was media. With San-shin (Mountain God), San-ryeong (Mountain Spirit), Sam-seong (Three Saints), and Chil-seong (Seven Stars)—none of whom belonged in a Buddhist temple—intervening in the ga-ram (temple compound), the shaman in leopard print roared, bursting into a lion’s sermon.⁵ That sermon, mediated through media, was projected onto the wall, delivering the “voice of heaven” [divine utterance or oracle]. In truth, Small Art History (2014/2017) and Citizen’s Forest (2016) are languages of that sermon.

Art history is a chronology of images. Chronology cannot escape the narration of time. To renew that narration, one must either embed image algorithms into it or fracture time and open the algorithm’s extensibility toward all ten directions (śífang). Only by negating time can a heretical language be born. Heresy is trickery. Let us not forget that the word “art” (美術) originally meant “the great deer shaman who performs magic.”⁶ When trickery of “meaning” is unfolded in all ten directions and connected through images, speech is born on the first floor. That speech could interact in real time with visitors to the gallery. The slide TV was a telex. In mechanical terms, the telex was a teleprinter-based communication service allowing direct dial-up between subscribers for data transmission. Even without a recipient, the telex could automatically print incoming messages on paper tape. The archive table at the gallery’s entrance and the deer-shaman telex together had “printed” the image algorithms of Small Art History as if they were revelations from spiritual resonance.

One cluster of “image-speech” (畫語) in Small Art History relied on a myth of wells that connects foreground and background. In such a time, where the past and future coalesce, this world and the next are opened in a single continuity—a twilight hour when “the sound of the temple bell rings through the cloister, and suddenly / all the men of the capital vanish, and the world is transformed / into one of only women.”⁷ In France, it is called the hour of dogs and wolves; in Korea, it is the hour when goblins emerge. It is the hour when shadows vanish from the well. When the shadow disappears, the depths below are illuminated. The abyss connects seamlessly with the world above; the well becomes a singular aperture without sides. The tale of an egg rising from such a well is told in the Samguk Yusa. Park Chan-kyong draws upon this and weaves together nianfo rebirth, the verticality of East and West, celestial ascents, and the “one true mind” of immortality by juxtaposing works by Kim Hong-do, Ed Ruscha, Hieronymus Bosch, and illustrations from the Chinese mythology compendium Classic of Mountains and Seas. Min Joung-ki’s Ten Thousand Pinnacles of Mount Geumgang (1999) is a masterstroke that brings these mythic and religious perspectives of the well into the plane of reality. Min not only transforms conceptual narrative into a realism-based aesthetic but also reveals that a landscape itself can be an image of a “bright whirlwind.” This whirling landscape corresponds to the feng shui geography of Sindoan—a circular form of Ja Mi Won Guk (Purple Forbidden Enclosure), said to be the most auspicious site. This is none other than what Laozi referred to in the Tao Te Ching as “the gate of myriad wonders.”

Back Shrine, 100 Scenes of the Korean War That Made Me Cry, The Lemures, Military Immortal Crossing the River, Sindoan, Portrait of Filial Piety, Portrait of Songho, and Embrace, along with the rest of the plates, are phantom images of a moment when this world and the next collide upon the surface of the well. The unfolding of those phantom images into a montage is precisely what Citizen’s Forest becomes. “No matter how filthy the mire, it is fine,” said Kim Soo-young. “No matter how filthy the tradition, it is fine. No matter how filthy the history, it is fine.” When such mire, tradition, and history are clothed in the imagery of Oh Yoon, the result is a video composed of fragmented narratives of “countless reactions.” During the 1970s and 1980s, when Western modern aesthetics had reached their peak in Korean painting, Oh Yoon created The Lemures as a gothic counterpoint—much like how Bosch, in the Renaissance era, parodied the optimism of reason and science through his paintings of medieval pessimism.⁸ Park Chan-kyong has already referred to this as “Asian Gothic.” For example, in his keynote lecture at 〈Media City Seoul 2014〉, he emphasized that the world and Asia cannot be viewed through the framework of the “nation-state.” He proposed observing unexpected relationships between peripheries beyond Asia and added:

“Like Claude Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage, Asia is itself a process of transformation that reconstructs itself through shifts in time and perspective. Chinese philosopher Wang Hui, resurrecting the postwar Japanese thinker Takeuchi Yoshimi’s idea of ‘rewinding the West,’ argues that Asia must fulfill the positive values of Western modernity—such as democracy and equality—more thoroughly. Wang Hui expresses this with the oxymoronic phrase ‘modernity against modernity.’ Once freed from the frame of modernity, Asia will become a space overflowing with ‘strange modernities.’”⁹



Slipping into Tradition, into the Real

Not only in Korea, but across the foundation of Asian modernity, a complex mixture of concepts such as colonialism, the Saemaul Movement, anti-superstition campaigns, tradition, ideological conflicts, Red Army/South Korean Army, West/modernity, fake reality/actual life, fantasy, modernization/urbanization, contemporary history, self (individual/subject) and others (the Other), modernism, and capitalism persists. All of these concepts of modernity (including “modern” and “modernization”) may be ideological by nature. The sad shadow of this male-centric and violent ideology is etched deeply into The Lemures. The fragmented and discontinuous scenes of Citizen’s Forest revive this shadow. As a cinematic device to pacify the restless spirits roaming the nine heavens, the gut performed in the film becomes a shamanic rite—both jin-ogwi gut and shigim-gut. The extended video, like a long scroll of time, loops from beginning to end. The conclusion of this appeasement is a Milky Way of Park Chan-kyong-style objects replacing the symbolic relics of Kim Soo-young’s “countless reactions”—objects like chamber pots, headbands, long pipes, ancestral tablets, bullets, copperware, herbal medicine signs, shrines, leather shops, pockmarked faces, blind eyes, infertile women, and the ignorant.

However, there is a major difference between The Lemures and Citizen’s Forest. Oh Yoon’s painting, by deploying a gothic visual grammar across several frames, drenches the viewer in an emotional state of empathy with the horrors of modernity. Whether through pathos or resonance, once a viewer is drawn into the image, they cannot easily escape. In contrast, Park Chan-kyong’s video does not demand emotional immersion or cinematic absorption. Viewers may even find themselves expressing discomfort through a sense of detachment or alienation. This alienation—this estrangement—is as coldly cynical as the water Bertolt Brecht once poured over his audience. Yet without such distancing, it may be impossible to gaze directly upon “modernity.”

The Bright Star and Chilseongdo series, created in collaboration with Kim Sang-don, originate from the shamanic tool called myeongdu (明斗/明圖). The symbolic meanings of the myeongdu, a brass ritual mirror, are dual. The convex front is a mirror, while the back is uneven and engraved with the sun, moon, seven stars (Chilseong), and Sanskrit characters. Usually, a string is attached through a loop at the center. The artwork includes three front-facing and three back-facing versions of the myeongdu, presented on birch panels painted with dancheong patterns, alongside works where artificial leopard print fabric is substituted for the center, and others showing both front and back sides. The inscriptions on the back read: North Star (北斗), Star-Mirror (星明斗), Seven-Star Mirror (七星明斗), and North-Star Seven-Star Mirror (北斗七星明斗).

The National Museum of Korea houses a “Bronze Mirror with Dragon and Cloud Patterns” from the Goryeo dynasty. Dragons and clouds are shamanic symbols associated with rain. In Jeju shamanism, the Chilseong god appears in the form of a snake (dragon). The seven stars are also the seven sons of Princess Bari, who became stars upon their deaths—this links to the origin stories of afterlife deities in jin-ogwi gut and shigim-gut. The space of Bright Star and Chilseongdo corresponds to a celestial realm, connected to the antlered shamanic telex on the first floor. Siberian Tungusic shamans wore massive antlered crowns and bronze mirrors during their sacred rites. Just as prayers are offered to Chilseong, the shaman acts as the medium of the Seven Star deity—and it was through the myeongdu, as the corporeal manifestation of that deity, that the divine face was glimpsed. A viewer ascending to the second floor after seeing Citizen’s Forest might encounter the bright spirits of the pacified souls in these “bright stars.”

The Way to Seunggasa reads like a series of steps taken by the viewer, who has internalized the bright star, along the ascetic journey of a living Buddha (saengbul). Seunggasa is a temple that enshrines Seungga-daesa, known as the “living Buddha.” Sitting in a blue or red chair beneath a parasol, the viewer watches the slide projections. The “I” who chases these images eventually meets eyes with those on the journey. It is the moment when reality and unreality intertwine. Under a parasol arranged like a dwitjeon (back shrine), one prays with makgeolli for blessings, draws a myeongdu, and interprets the fortune based on the number of grains of rice. In that instant, “I” become them, the viewer, the Seunggasa monk, and the shaman—a curious transformation.

Come to think of it, we forgot MoonWalk by Michael Jackson. Why, then, did Park Chan-kyong suddenly insert MoonWalk so incongruously? Perhaps it was to suggest that, after that strange experience, time no longer moves toward the future, but rather slides into an invisible real—called tradition.

Published in the Fall 2017 Issue of 〈Hwanghae Review〉


—
¹ Based on the press release distributed by Kukje Gallery.
² The boat of prajñā pāramitā is also known as panya-yongseon (般若龍船). The main hall (daewoongjeon) in a Buddhist temple compound (ga-ram) symbolizes this boat.
³ In classical literature, “an-nyeong” first appears in The Book of Songs (Shijing): “When war is pacified and peace (an-nyeong) arrives…” In Zhuangzi, it is written: “Desiring peace for the world, he saved the lives of the people.” It was not originally a greeting, but a word meaning “peace.”
⁴ When one is not at peace, one is in a state of mi-an (未安). An-rak (安樂) means peace and bliss—equivalent to Anyang Pure Land (安養淨土). Park Chan-kyong presented I Want to Be Reborn, in Anyang as part of the Anyang Public Art Project in 2010. The city name “Anyang” (安養) is itself borrowed from the Buddhist term for the Pure Land. Park interpreted the ideograph “An” (安), where a woman stays at home, wears a hat, and when inverted, appears to be hanging, as melancholic symbolism of Anyang as a city of mi-an, an unpeaceful modernized town.
⁵ During the indigenization of Korean Buddhism, Mountain God Halls (Sanshingak) and Mountain Spirit Shrines (Sanryeonggak) were incorporated into temple complexes. The Mountain God (Sanshin) is typically depicted with a tiger.
⁶ The character 美 (“beauty”) is derived from “great deer antlers,” symbolizing the ancient shaman. 術 (“art” or “technique”) originally referred to magical skill and those who wielded it—called bangsa (方士) or jin-in (眞人).
⁷ Kim Soo-young, 〈Colossal Roots〉 (1964), from Colossal Roots, Minumsa, 1974.
⁸ Bosch was criticized by Renaissance contemporaries as a “Gothic Revivalist” or “Medievalist.”
⁹ Park Chan-kyong, “Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers—Theme as Pattern,” keynote lecture, Media City Seoul 2014.

References

• [리뷰] 스스로 도는 힘 - 박찬경의 《안녕 安寧 Farewell》 읽기
  [Review] The Power to Spin on Its Own – Reading Park Chan-kyong’s 《Farewell 安寧》