Park Chan-kyong Gathering
National Museum of Asian Art
In Park Chan-kyong’s solo exhibition, “Gathering,” ghosts appeared in various forms: as radioactive remains, as a sun-dappled dream, as self-unravelling garments. Across five photographic and video works, the South Korean media artist explored the legacies of historical trauma and disasters that can still be traced in contemporary society.
An eerie, black-and-white film opened the exhibition on the cusp, in the middle, and (2019) follows two hikers—a scientist measuring radiation, and a woman searching for a shipping container—as they explore the mountains and escape what appears to be a world on fire. As one of them scans a Buddhist temple for radioactivity, the other stumbles through wailing rock shrines. In the end, both meet at the shipping container to join a funeral rite, a scene that reinterprets the legend of Buddha’s death. The film’s inverted colors paired with the ominous beeping of a Geiger counter created a barren, contaminated, postapocalyptic world that is unsettling and uncomfortable to experience. Park’s intertwining of Buddhist imagery and a barren nuclear landscape engenders contemplation of tradition in the face of evolving technology, subtly hinted at in , the museum’s 3D interactive model of a Northern Qi dynasty Buddha statue pointedly placed by the entrance of “Gathering.”
