Born in Seoul in 1965, Park was raised in a Catholic family with older brother Park Chan-wook, who grew as much as turn into the extra well-known of the 2. (He’s the director of such movies as “Oldboy” and “Determination to Go away.”) The youthful Park earned an MFA on the California Institute of the Arts earlier than returning to South Korea to turn into often called a lot as a critic as an artist.
The 5 works in “Gathering,” Park’s first solo present in a serious U.S. museum, deal with comparatively current historic cataclysms. Amongst these are the division of Korea into north and south, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in close by Japan, and the 2014 sinking of a ferry that precipitated the deaths of 304 individuals, most of them highschool college students. However the items additionally invoke the beliefs and ceremonies of Buddhism and the polytheistic Korean folks faith normally described in English as shamanism.
“I’ve some tendencies to be non secular,” Park acknowledged in the course of the query interval after the museum’s Oct. 23 screening of “Night time Fishing,” a 2011 quick movie written and directed by the artist and his older brother.
“Gathering” consists of 5 artworks, two of them movies and the others primarily based on nonetheless photographs. As a photographer, although, Park is just about a filmmaker. Two of the non-video items embrace slide reveals wherein one picture melts into one other nearly as shortly as in a film.
The stillest entry is the title piece, which assembles 24 rectangular images: all particulars of a conventional temple portray depicting the Buddha’s attainment of nirvana. The pictorial excerpts are hung in irregular trend alongside either side of a slender, nearly hallway-like gallery, certainly one of two such areas within the present. “Gathering’s” themes of dying, serenity and transcendence recur in a number of items, however within the different ones the motifs and characters mix and overlap. Right here, the creatures assembled to bid farewell to the Buddha are sequestered from each other inside frames. Though derived from a portray, “Gathering” is the paintings within the present that’s most like a set of pictures.
Buddhist mourning rituals are integrated into the 2 movies, the 26-minute “Citizen’s Forest” and the 55-minute “Belated Bonsal.” And there are quite a few photographs of deserted cemeteries in “Fukushima: Autoradiography,” a montage of stills that mixes Park’s images with photographs captured by two Japanese collaborators, photographer Masamichi Kagaya and botanist Satoshi Mori.
Kagaya and Mori make images of radioactive crops, fruits and different artifacts that glow ominously. “Belated Bonsal” is printed like a black-and-white destructive, suggesting a world that’s been irradiated into an X-ray model of itself. In each works, up to date nuclear threats underscore the looming prospect of dying.
“Bonsal” is the Korean phrase for a bodhisattva, an individual who has achieved enlightenment however forgoes nirvana to remain on Earth and save others. The video re-creates scenes from work illustrating the story of the Buddha’s chief disciple, Mahakasyapa, who was late to his trainer’s cremation.
The exhibition’s centerpiece is “Citizen’s Forest,” a video whose excessive widescreen format remembers classic Asian scroll landscapes. It was additionally designed in homage to Korean artist Oh Yoon’s unfinished 1984 painting of a procession of ghosts — victims of such tragedies of contemporary Korean historical past because the Korean Conflict. In Park’s video, the phantoms march by means of a mountainous wooded space and embrace skull-headed musicians, males who’re bare from the waist down and schoolgirls who drowned within the ferry catastrophe. The spare rating options drums, whistles, a plaintive horn and shamanic chants.
Ghosts and Korean shamans are identified to maintain firm. One number of shaman is claimed to have the ability to channel the spirit of a useless individual, as depicted in “Night time Fishing.” Park’s varied artworks appear to suit collectively, whether or not easily or jaggedly, right into a collaged imaginative and prescient of Korean historical past and id. To evaluate from “Gathering,” the artist’s profession can also be an ongoing montage.
Park Chan-kyong: Gathering
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Nationwide Museum of Asian Artwork, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. asia.si.edu.
