PARK Chungki_WALK and REST
2018.5.15-8.19
Daegu Art Museum conducts the Y+ Artist Project every year to select artists in their 40s positioning themselves between young and senior artists and organize their solo exhibition. PARK Chungki was selected in the third Y+ Artist Project in 2018, who has expressed critical perspective and humors on socio-pathological phenomena through performance video and installation works.
A garden has for long been a space to reflect on and discipline oneself in the East, while it has been used to reveal one’s status or preference in the West, making it highly considered in the architectural culture of the two worlds. As depicted in Mongyu-dowon-do (Dream-Journey to the Immortal-Peach Orchard) by great Korean painting by An Gyeon and The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, it has been dealt with as a space to get a glimpse of ideological and religious trends. In this sense, we would like to look into the inner world of modern people as well as the current facets of today’s world through six spaces he has designated with a metaphor of ‘walking in a garden’. In this exhibition, we would like viewers to look at his works as if to take a walk along the organic space connected through six different themes.
The six gardens are as follows:
The first garden is a space to exhibit on-site performances, their records and archives of Daegu Art Museum filled with works reflecting spirits of times which drove industrialization seen in the current perspective. The second garden is a bamboo garden on the theme of labor in the world of neo-liberalism where animal doll masks are installed representing modern people along with strange videos and sounds. The third one is with video works in which he experimented on conveying intuitive meanings beyond the world of language, and the fourth one presents small modeling works and drawings reflecting his basic ideas on imaginary gardens. The fifth one is on an incidence of ‘expulsion from the Garden of Eden’ representing a modern version of a garden with apple trees implying the era of capitalism full of materialistic desire. The six one is a work of an extension of Kasimir Malevich's painting, Black Square into a three-dimensional work, hinting at an experiment with intuitive cognition through conversion of directions into the inner world beyond visual recognition.
PARK wishes the audience to take a look at the inner landscape of modern people to see how neo-liberalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution beyond industrialization are reflected in consciousness and sub-consciousness of individuals by walking around in six spaces. Daegu Art Museum hopes that it would offer a time to diagnose and understand the psyche of the society and people in the modern world.
<Near & Far>
PARK symbolically deals with the two epochal spirits involved in industrialization, which impact our mode of thinking both consciously and subconsciously. He pays attention to their current activities to see their implications for us. The two heterogeneous energies of being a masculine culture and a feminine culture alike are encountered in a single space to interpret the epochal spirits in a multidimensional manner.
<Part-time heavenⅡ>
A garden with bamboos might look like a space for a rest, but a video depicting a waving ox tail and its sound, and animal masks hung here and there seem unfamiliar. The animal masks represent modern people being forced to live as anonymous laborers. In this work, the audience encounter their image of being denied even in a space of rest and meditation.
<The Gibberish>
A language is a means for communication but faces limits of having distort the reality. In this work, the artist experiments with ways to intuitively and straightforwardly convey meanings without distorting objects.
<A Model’s Room>
It is an imaginary garden where ideas he envisages are gathered together in prototypes.
<The First Garden>
It is based on an incidence of ‘Expulsion from Eden.’ The fundamental desire of humans in Eden – an ideal space – is extended into a materialistic desire for consumption and ownership in the modern world in the work which represents exploitation of humans, the nature and self, and self-denial.
<A 20 second look at Malevich>
It is a work to experience darkness as the light is turned off as one approaches a black square painting like that of Kasimir Malevich. It is an extension of a two-dimensional space into a three-dimensional one, representing his experiment with intuitive cognition by converting the cognition into the inner world, moving beyond visual cognition.
