Park Chan-kyong is currently holding his first ever US solo exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery through July 1, 2016.One of Korea’s most acclaimed interdisciplinary and multimedia artists, Park has had solo presentations at Atelier Hermes (2012, 2008), the Gwangju Biennale (2006), and Ssamzie Art Space (2005), and shown his work at a number of major international galleries and museums including the National Art School Gallery, Sydney (2011), RedCat Gallery in Los Angeles (2010), Kunstverein in Frankfurt (2005), and De Appel in Amsterdam (2003).Drawing from the past decade of his output, this exhibition delves deep into the knotty complexities of Korea’s North-South relations, as well as the shamanic rituals and indigenous traditions of his native country. While often perceived as a hyper-capitalist, technocratic state symbolized by the gleaming skyscrapers of Seoul, South Korea has a particularly conflicted modern history, shaped by successive waves of foreign colonization, civil war, communist incursions, and religious displacement.Cyberpunk themes with a tinge of political exigency can also be found in “Power Passage” (2004-7), a two-channel video piece set in the year 1975 that freely blends fact and fiction, telling a plausible tale of Pyongyang’s attempt to dig a secret tunnel in order to send clandestine spies to Seoul, set against an ongoing cold war and technological arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.Equally emblematic of many of Park’s longstanding concerns is his sound and photo installation “Three Cemeteries” (2009), whose title refers to three collective burial sites near the DMZ that are reserved for entombing people with a certain outsider status in mainstream Korean society — unrepatriated citizens of North Koreans, anonymous sex workers who plied their trade near US military bases, and so on.“Night Fishing” (2011), which won Park the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011, evokes what the artist has called an “Asian Gothic.” Drawing freely from the clichés and tropes of the global horror film imaginary, Park crafts a tale about a shaman who summons forth a man who has been unjustly killed, all while defying the linear temporal logic of narrative film in a virtuosic way.Park Chan-kyong’s exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery runs through July 1, 2016.
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