Park Hyun-ki

Park Hyun-ki (, 1942 – January 13, 2000) was a pioneer of Korean video art. For Park, video was just one technological instance in the histories of innovation and of exploration of the relationship between reality and illusion. According to the scholar Jung E. Choi, Park aimed to reconcile what TV/video signified as a medium (i.e., "technology, illusion, and materiality") and what it could convey (i.e., "nature, perception, and materiality"). Park enrolled in Hongik University in 1961; Beginning in 1978, he gained initial access to video technology and created his first video artworks in Daegu (at K Studio, a commercial studio that belonged to the photographer Kwon Joongin) and in Japan (through the Japanese video artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi).

The media theorist Yi Wonkon has observed that Park's video works presented in the 1978 and 1979 Daegu Contemporary Art Festivals used water and video to question binaries such as real/virtual and natural/technological —an interrogative methodology that Park would continue to pursue throughout his career.

Untitled (TV Stone Pagoda) series Park's series Untitled (TV Stone Pagoda) are among the works for which he is best known.

Performances Within Park's artistic practice, performance constituted not an isolated genre, but instead intersected with his incorporations of natural materials/objects, such as stones or water, and documentation, via video or photography. Two early examples of Park's performances are Video Inclining Water and Pass Through the City.

While experimenting with video equipment during his 1978 trip to Japan, Park recorded the first version of his Video Inclining Water performance. Documentation of the performance shows Park tilting the video monitor in coordination to the video image of water that is being played, to give an illusion as if his movements coordinate the changing directions of the water level. For the 1979 Sao Paulo Biennial, Park re-staged and re-recorded Video Inclining Water in Sao Paulo, and exhibited ten photographs to document the performance.

For the 1981 performance Pass Through the City, Park fabricated a replica of a stone quarried from Seoul, then drove it through Daegu on top of a truck. On a section of the stone Park had mounted a mirror, which reflected the cityscape passing by; he also situated a video camera on the truck's roof opposite the stone, to record the mirror's reflection. As Yi Wonkon has observed, Passing Through the City is a meditation upon the stone as embodying reflections of civilization and time.

Late work In the mid to late 1990s, Park shifted away from using television monitors and toward beam projectors, which enabled him to create more expansive video installations —a technological transition many Korean media artists made during these years. However, Park's works with video projections were limited, in part due to his early death in the year 2000.

For the InfoArt section of the 1995 Gwangju Biennale, Park employed projected video for his work The Blue Dining Table. In this work, recordings of recent disasters, such as the Kobe earthquake and the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store (both in 1995), were projected onto plaster casts of the artist's body parts, placed on various dish ware, evoking how the outcries of these disasters have permeated Park's own body.

Produced between 1996 and 1997, Park's Mandala series interwove myriad clips from pornography with erotic Buddhist and Hindu images and often projected the content from the ceiling onto a dish or vessel. The works transgresses the boundaries between the secular and the sacred to create, in Yi Won-kon's words, "a chaos of life and desire," and, in Jung E. Choi's, a "state of transcendence."

After Park's death, a work from the Presence and Reflection series was first presented at the grand opening of the independent space Art Center Nabi on January 1, 2000. His final work, Individual Code, was realized according to its description in his will and presented at the third Gwangju Biennale. The work consisted of a video of a series of fingerprints with a resident registration number overlaid, appearing and disappearing; in effect, it juxtaposed a symbol of born, corporeal identity with that of the national system of identification.