This artwork is a video recording of a performance by Park Hyunki, one of Korea’s first-generation video artists who deployed a unique artistic language by combining Western art and traditional Korean ideas. He participated in Seoul’s burgeoning avant-garde art scene in the 1960s before relocating to his hometown of Daegu in the 1970s, where he developed a series of works using video as a medium and as well as a basis for spiritual epiphany amid the experimental art movement he pioneered. In the early 1980s, when color television broadcasts were first introduced in Korea, Park loaded an artwork consisting of a three-meter artificial rock with an attached mirror onto a large trailer and executed a performance while traveling through downtown Daegu to Maekhyang Gallery, located 12 kilometers away. This performance was broadcast in real-time within the exhibition hall using footage from security cameras installed around the city as well as an on-site cameraman. By interpreting video as an extension of the body, a mediation of the body, an object of contemplation and a transcendent gaze, the artist captures simple, flexible and conceptual thoughts about media in this performance.
