By Mark Jenkins
National Museum of Asian Art inaugurates galleries dedicated to modern and contemporary art with videos and photos that explore Korean history and identity.
Korean history and tradition suffuse the work of Park Chan-kyong, whose photographs and videos are the subject of the inaugural show in the National Museum of Asian Art’s new galleries dedicated to modern and contemporary art. If the themes undergirding Park’s “Gathering” prove unfamiliar to many of the show’s visitors, some of them are also fairly new to the artist. His work reclaims aspects of Korea surrendered to the Westernization that shaped people like him.
Born in Seoul in 1965, Park was raised in a Catholic household with older brother Park Chan-wook, who grew up to become the more famous of the two. (He’s the director of such films as “Oldboy” and “Decision to Leave.”) The younger Park earned an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts before returning to South Korea to become known as much as a critic as an artist.
The five works in “Gathering,” Park’s first solo show in a major U.S. museum, address relatively recent historic cataclysms. Among these are the division of Korea into north and south, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in nearby Japan, and the 2014 sinking of a ferry that caused the deaths of 304 people, most of them high school students. But the pieces also invoke the beliefs and ceremonies of Buddhism and the polytheistic Korean folk religion usually described in English as shamanism...
