Late media artist Park Hyun-ki’s exhibition `Mandala` opens

Zhou Yu, a military strategist of Eastern Wu in the novel "Romance of Three Kingdoms," blames the heaven, saying, “You gave birth to Zhou Yu and why did you send Zhuge Liang into the world?”

If Park Hyun-ki (1942-2000), whose retroactive exhibition is being held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon through May 25, is Zhou Yu, Paik Nam-june (1932-2006) would be Zhuge Liang. Though Park did not get a huge fame like Paik, he concentrated on creating his own style by blending Western media technologies with Eastern philosophy.

It is the first archive exhibition of some 20,000 pieces of his artworks donated by his family after two years of assortment. It showcases some 1,000 pieces ranging from memos in his 20s to his signature installation in his prime time to his idea sketches before death. Park suddenly passed away after being diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2000 when he was busy preparing for private exhibitions at home and abroad and the Gwangju Biennale.

The name of the exhibition is from his video work, which was first unveiled in New York in the summer of 1997. Mandala is a circular Buddhist painting representing the enlightenment of universal essence. The artwork shows colorful groups of people repeat weird movements in the circular projection screen. If you look into the details, you will find each video is pornographic images. He focused on the idea that esoteric Buddhism, a kind of Mahayana Buddhism that created Mandala, led to Tantra, which valued sexual power after the eighth century.

It is an exhibition without the artist, whose trace is more vivid in his notes than his artworks. Park`s ideas are written beside the five fingers spread out in the middle of an exhibition poster in the 1990s. “A person’s face has five sensory organs, sound has five basic elements, a person has five energies, the earth has five bearings and there are five basic colors,” the artist left a note.