RADIANCE

This is the first solo exhibition of Park Chan-Kyong's work to be held at PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault. It features the video work Sindoan as well as 28 new works, including a series of photographs of temples in and around Seoul, and various paintings, works on paper, and a sculptural installation inspired by Simcheongga—a well-known pansori work, a form of Korean folk narrative that is sung. The exhibition title, "Radiance," references the final passage from Simcheongga in which all the blind people, as well as earthly creatures, miraculously open their eyes at once. The scene is a depiction, at once dynamic and fervent, of an idea of a Korean utopia that has been transmitted through the generations. If the video work Sindoan, re-edited into four channels for this exhibition, deals with a specific, actual site of collective utopian aspirations in Korean history, the new paintings and photographs in the exhibition examine in a broader context the encounters and collisions of modernity with the utopian imagination in Korean culture.

For Park, "Radiance" constitutes a kind of "field study" of traditional Korean culture. But instead of considering traditional culture simply as a form of national or collective heritage to be preserved, he sees it as something that is unfamiliar, strange, at times an object of fear. He turns to totemic images of rocks and mountains, temples and stone-carved Buddhas, folk painting and pansori in his work, but he points up the tension between the sense of urgency and, ultimately, the sense of emptiness in the search for these things. The artist states, "Seoul, Korea, indeed the entire world now seem to be brightly lit, radiant. The night has become illuminated thanks to the electric light. But the enlightened society nevertheless continues to grow further distant from true light, vision, a sense of community. It is growing distant from even the imagination and memory of utopia." (PKM Gallery)