Park Hyunki’s “Pass Through the City”

It has become de rigueur to try to establish an alternate genealogy of Korean video art to the one dominated by Nam June Paik, who spent most of his life abroad. Over the past couple of decades—particularly after a 2015 retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul—Park Hyunki (1942–2000) has routinely been cited as a foundational figure among video artists in Korea, though the artist himself resisted the pigeonholing of his practice into one medium.

The efforts to canonize Park obscure some of the slipperier valences of his work: namely, how he kept alive the tension between moving image and other mediums—particularly sculpture—by constantly trying to define one through the other. Having first encountered the video works of Nam June Paik in 1974, Park took a decidedly divergent, low-tech approach to video, treating it as a material object existing among other objects. An exhibition at Gallery Hyundai shows how Park was able to integrate video into these larger sculptural and performance-based concerns.

The exhibition centers on one tripartite performance staged on March 22, 1981, called Pass Through the City and documented here by three videos and twenty-four photographs. For this performance, Park fabricated two enormous stones out of resin and embedded mirrors onto their surfaces. He installed one stone (measuring 2.5 × 3 meters) on the floor of Maekhyang Gallery, cutting out a wall to haul it inside, and loaded the other (measuring 2.2 × 3 meters) onto a sixteen-meter truck that he drove through downtown Daegu at a speed of 12 mph for forty minutes. Park gathered about twenty artists and cameramen to document from multiple angles the stone’s journey in 8 mm film and Betamax video. After the forty-minute ride, the artist moved this stone to a busy sidewalk by a bank. He attached a Betamax video camera to a wall of a nearby building to capture the interactions of head-scratching passersby with the colossal artificial stone: the crowds touch its naturalistic surface, swarm around it, and look at themselves in the mirror.

This video footage was fed live to a monitor installed inside Maekhyang Gallery. In addition, three much smaller artificial stones were placed on the stairs of a subway station, in front of a department store, and on the sidewalks. Taken altogether, these sculptural stones metastasized across Daegu, linked by the connective tissues of live transmission and video feedback. Park considered the mirror a screen, just as he did with any reflective surface, including water. The most ubiquitous screen at this time was television. By 1979—two years before Park staged Pass Through the City—around eighty percent of Korean households were using black-and-white television sets. After seizing power and installing himself as president, and to divert civilians’ attention away from his violent state suppression of the pro-democracy Gwangju uprising of May 1980, Chun Doo-hwan had the major television stations broadcast their programs in color from December of that year.

As David Harvey wrote in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), “the world’s geographical complexity is nightly reduced to a series of images on a static television screen.” Harvey contended that television was the first cultural medium in history to present the past and present as simultaneously existing phenomena. If television—especially as weaponized by Chun to distract people from his repressive regime—offers a perception of history “as an endless reserve of equal events,”1 Park achieves a similar uninterrupted flow through his screen—the mirror on the stone—but one that hypostatizes civic consciousness instead of anesthetizing it. Through the video footage taken from the truck beside the stone, the cityscape of Daegu is reflected and mediated in real time through the stone’s mirror: faces of students, office workers, and bus drivers—a literal multiplication of collective will in an era of military dictatorship. This sociopolitical context is remarkably underdiscussed in writings about Park, which often take for granted an urban, cohesively collective space as if it weren’t conditioned by martial law.

If Western media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard attributed television’s narcotizing effects to its form over its content, as if the screen becomes a kind of absorptive architecture that we inhabit, Park situates the screen as a roving object that is subject to the larger urban architecture, not the other way around. Across his works, he always sought to foreground the objecthood of the televisual image. Starting in 1979, for example, the artist experimented with sculptural stones and cathode-ray televisions in installations like “TV Stone Tower” that posit an equivalency between the actual slabs of stone and images of stones on the television monitors. His memories of fleeing south during the Korean War in the early 1950s and watching refugees throw stones onto makeshift doltap (stone towers) traditionally erected at entrances to villages to repel bad luck led Park to study architecture at Hongik University in the early 1960s. Rejecting Western sculptural techniques like carving, welding, and chiseling, he became interested in piling stones as a sculptural method.

Ostensibly, Pass Through the City operates through two levels of mediation. Firstly, as outlined above, the mirror in the artificial stone mediates collective consciousness via reflection. The second level of mediation consists of the videos and photographs documenting this entire performance as it occurs in real time. A further level is provided by the exhibition gallery format that displays, over forty years later, these very videos and photographs. Of course, archival materials are often the only way through which we can reconstruct and retroactively apprehend time-bound performances. But the overreliance on archival materials—videos and photographs—for a performance that is, at its core, about mediation itself, saps the work of vitality. This is true particularly in the case of Park, who took up the medium of video so brazenly under a dictatorship. This very medium of video, remediated through a present-day white-cube exhibition, becomes mummified into an “archival tool,” a moribund telescope letting us glimpse the past at a remove. This is not necessarily the fault of the gallery or museum; it feels more interesting to understand it as a built-in condition of technologies that court their own obsolescence. The price that video pays for capturing something so immediately in the moment is, perhaps, alienation later on.