by Aimee Lin
The ghosts of history haunt Park Chan-kyong's recent works. Of course this haunting occurs metaphorically. But in Citizen's Forest (2016) the Seoul-based artist renders them actual: a series of figures processing through a mountain forest. In Kyoto School (2017) they are mere voices, from the diaries of Japanese kamikaze pilots, and in Way to the Seung-ga Temple (2017), they manifest as the items abandoned over the years by nameless visitors to Bukhan Mountain. All of these—restless souls, fragments of thought and trivial objects—are beings that have been forgotten, or are ignored, beings that do not exist in mainstream observation and discussion. What Park does in his art is to summon them by means of moving images and then, particularly in the case of Citizen's Forest, lay them to rest in quietness and peace (as annyeong-part of the title of Park's recent solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery, Seoul - means when translated from Korean) with a shamanistic farewell ceremony.
Park is an art critic, film director and visual artist who first came to prominence during the 1990s and early 2000s, via works dealing with recent history—the Cold War and the division of the Korean peninsula—as well as through a film collaboration with his older brother, Park Chan-wook. Then, in a 2008 essay ('On Sindoan: Some Scattered Views on Tradition and "The Sublime"', translated from the Korean by Doryun Chong), the artist described how a change in his attitude towards tradition had led to a shift of interest: to someone 'who was born in Seoul and raised as a Catholic in a high-rise apartment complex,' he explains, 'Korean traditional culture, especially traditional religious culture, is unfamiliar from the very start and may be even said to belong more to the realm of the imagination than to reality.' Consequently, the artist had long postponed any engagement with traditional culture, until, as he puts it, he felt that 'like a rock that you repeatedly trip over because you have neglected to move it out of the way, it becomes something you end up regretting somewhere down the line'...
