Seoul Mediacity Biennial featuring Park Chan-kyong: The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennial | Seoul Museum of Art

The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Séance: Technology of the Spirit begins with a question: what role has spiritual experience played in the development of modern and contemporary art? Over the past decade, it has been impossible to ignore the number of artists turning for inspiration to alternative forms of knowledge. The mystic, visionary, or arcane—often as enshrined in suppressed cultural traditions—has come to occupy a central place in the artistic discourse. This renewed interest in spiritual practice seems to us to respond to a broader crisis in how we make sense of the world. This Biennale is a space for spiritual encounter, for perceptual expansion, for dreamlike communion. A space for exceptional works of art to speak, summon, and transform.

Park Chan-kyong’s work as a visual artist, film director, and writer explores the enduring influence of Buddhist and shamanistic beliefs on Korean society through decades of dizzying political and economic transformation.

This new series of paintings presents a tale from the thirteenth-century Samguk Yusa (Stories of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea). Having travelled to China during the Tang Dynasty to study with Wuwei Sanzang, only for the great master to refuse to teach him, Monk Hyetong expressed his determination to learn Buddhism by carrying a flaming brazier on his head. This story is still often depicted on the exterior walls of Buddhist temples in Korea.

Park Chan-kyong’s own interpretation of the iconography of Monk Hyetong allows the artist to reflect on the universe, meaning, and death while enjoying the ineffable nature of these reflections. The supposed lack of refinement and “inaccuracy” (in such matters of perspective) of the painting on temple murals serves, he argues, to create a more playful and democratic space for the staging of Zen riddles.