Park Hyun-ki
[8]: 11 [6] The curator Kim Inhye has observed that—from bringing rocks into a gallery and running nude amidst them to stacking bricks, cutting railroad ties, and erecting planks—Park pursued an array of artistic mediums in highly experimental ways.
[8]: 10 [3]: 56 Back in Daegu, Park sought respite from the uptake of Western art historical canons and consumerism that he experienced during his studies in Seoul.
[3]: 80 [8]: 11 In 1974, Park first was compelled to experiment with video after seeing a screening of Nam June Paik’s Global Groove at the United States Information Service in Daegu.
[3]: 12 [4]: 240 Having read in Art in America about Paik’s arrest following a 1967 performance in New York, Park was, according to the media theorist and historian Yi Wonkon, “awestruck by the idea that TV, which he had always thought of as an ‘idiot box,’ can be the most avant-garde artistic tool.”[3]: 12 After seeing Paik’s work, Park visited a broadcasting studio in Daegu in order to observe its television equipment.
[5]: 83 Not a single work was sold during his lifetime, but he left behind his massive collection of over 20,000 artworks and items that were donated to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
[8]: 14 Beginning in the mid-1970s, Park Hyunki joined the artists Lee Kang-so, Hwang Hyeonuk, Choi Byung-so, Kim Youngjin, and others, to play a leading role in establishing the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival.
[3]: 38 An ephemeral artwork, it possessed the “sense of life that can easily be wiped off by wind, rain, and people’s footsteps,” which situated the work as unlike a long-lasting image.
[3]: 38 During the late 1970s, Park Hyunki and the artists Lee Kang-so, Kim Young-jin, and Choi Byung-so gained access to video equipment at K Studio in Daegu.
[3]: 26 Together, the four artists showed their experiments in a section titled Video and Film of the 4th Daegu Contemporary Arts Festival, which took place September 24–30, 1978.
[8]: 109 In 1980, Park Hyunki participated in the Biennale de Paris with another TV Stone Pagoda work, which was presented among the first section of video artworks in the exhibition’s history.
[6][8]: 11 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.
[13]: 457 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[8]: 15 —a technological transition many Korean media artists made during these years.
[3]: 94, 96 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.
[3]: 96 [12]: 33 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,”[3]: 96 and, in Jung E. Choi’s, a “state of transcendence.
"[9]: 273 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.
[8]: 280 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.
