Park Chan-Kyong: Gathering: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art

Park Chan-Kyong: Gathering

October 7, 2023 - Oct 13, 2024

Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art

Seoul-based artist Park Chan-kyong has gained international recognition for his use of photography and film to examine the complex history of modern Korea. Park Chan-kyong: Gathering is the first solo presentation of his work in a major U.S. museum. The exhibition features a range of works that highlight Park’s masterful use of the photographic medium to explore the enduring traces of tradition, history, and disaster in contemporary society.

Park’s multi-channel video, Citizen’s Forest, anchors this exhibition of five recent works. A panoramic video presented in the format of a monumental landscape scroll painting, Citizen’s Forest draws on the poetry of Kim Su-yeong (1921–68), Minjung painting, and folk culture to reflect on major tragedies in South Korea’s history from the late 19th century to the present. In Belated Bosal and Fukushima: Autoradiography, inverted images and the natural landscape convey the inescapable sense of ecological disaster. Another installment in Park’s study of the history of North and South Koreas, a series of still and moving image portraits titled Child Soldier reimagines the presence of a lonely North Korean soldier.