Kelvin Kyungkun Park (b. 1978) delves into the hidden byproducts and scenes of modern and contemporary Korean history, reinterpreting them in a multidimensional way. Engaging directly with these obscured realities, he unravels their images through media experiments in video, photography, and installation.

In his 2010 work Cheonggyecheon Medley, Park captures the redevelopment of Cheonggyecheon and the lives of the people centered around it through the medium of video. During this project, the artist rented a space in the Cheonggyecheon tool market, allowing him to closely observe the area and its residents, documenting them through his lens.

The video unfolds as a letter addressed to the artist’s grandfather, who operated a scrap metal factory in Japan during the Japanese colonial period before settling in Cheonggyecheon after Korea’s liberation. Memories of those times often resurfaced in the artist’s dreams, filled with scenes of metal being shaped and the piercing sounds of grinding steel.

Living and working within this environment, Park confronted his subconscious and began to recompose it, intertwining it with the collective unconscious shaped by Korea’s modern and contemporary history, expressed through video and sound.

Kelvin Kyungkun Park does not aim to convey a specific message or meaning about Cheonggyecheon, a symbolic space in Korea’s modern and contemporary history. Instead, he transforms the sensory landscapes he directly observed and experienced on-site into conscious art, reflecting the unconscious passed down through generations. 
 
Unfolding through the artist’s personal narrative, Cheonggyecheon Medley documents the disappearance of Cheonggyecheon as a "subjective documentary," where private memories and public history intertwine.

Subsequently, Park explored the relationship between past and present civilizations in his video work A Dream of Iron (2013). The project examines ships as symbols of Korea's industrialization, reflecting on them through the whales depicted in the Ulsan Bangudae petroglyphs. Inspired by the overlapping imagery of the curved, massive forms of whales and ships, Park began this work with a focus on their shared visual and cultural resonance. 

As the project developed, the artist discovered that both whales and ships played crucial roles in advancing prehistoric and modern Korean civilizations, respectively. This realization led him to reframe the significance of whales, the ships of Hyundai Heavy Industries, and the steel of POSCO as entities that have "nourished" Korea’s past and present.

The video begins with a narrated voice letter from the protagonist to his ex-girlfriend, who has become a Buddhist nun in her search for God. In the letter, he declares his intent to search for the god in his own way and sets off for Ulsan. The narrative transitions between scenes of Buddhist rituals, evoking the ‘past’ through ceremonies performed before the whale-carved petroglyphs, and the ‘present’ with depictions of constructing colossal ships. 

Park captures the overwhelming sights of these industrial sites with stunning vividness, rendering them almost surreal and majestic. Through this, he imbues steel—humanity's new ‘god’—with a sense of the sublime. Enhancing this reverence, the video incorporates Mahler's symphonies and the Tibetan chant technique, known for producing two simultaneous tones, further elevating the deification of steel.

The video also interweaves footage of labor protests by Hyundai Heavy Industries workers, capturing the tumultuous history of modern and contemporary Korea. Regarding A Dream of Iron, Park describes it as “a Bangudae petroglyph of the industrial age, created with digital media in the digital era.”

Produced in 2016 as a commissioned work for Hyundai Motors, 1.6 Sec. explores the relationship between humans and machines within today’s automated and mechanized environments. Park drew attention to the fact that the labor dispute that arose during the production process stemmed from the issue of reducing the robot's production time to 1.6 seconds.

The factory structure he observed did not align with the physical rhythms of human workers but instead required humans to adapt to the mechanical pace set by the robots, resulting in mechanized, synchronized human movements. Within this system, the artist also witnessed an ironic juxtaposition: the dynamic, lifelike movements of robots contrasted sharply with the dull, mechanical tasks performed by humans, whose gray, lifeless faces reflected a stark lack of vitality.

Within the mass production factory, machines moved like living, organic beings, while living humans appeared mechanized. Observing this, Park began to imagine: "What if we viewed humans through the eyes of robots?" or "What images would emerge if we saw the factory from a robot’s perspective?"

The video avoids narrative or structural storytelling, focusing instead solely on the essence of movement. The dynamic imagery in the film invites viewers to question whether humans are truly more perceptive and creative than robots or if they are merely mechanical entities operating within the constraints of organizations and society.

Meanwhile, ARMY: 600,000 Portraits (2016) captures the portraits of young soldiers during their military service. In this work, Park also focuses more on the soldiers’ expressions and movements rather than a structured narrative. The video alternates between scenes of soldiers forming a collective body in accordance with strict regulations and close-ups of individual expressions or body parts.

Through the artist’s lens, the military is depicted as a space reflecting the contradictory relationship between the individual and the group. While the soldiers appear as a unified entity, dressed in identical uniforms and moving in sync, the camera reveals subtle individualities—twitching lips, sidelong glances—emerging paradoxically in their state of heightened tension.

This work stems from the artist's own experience of military service after living abroad for an extended period. Having lived in an environment where personal freedom was valued, he entered the military, a place where collective discipline takes precedence over the individual, and he inevitably faced moments of losing his sense of self within the group.

For him, this was both a painful and intense experience. Ten years after his discharge, the artist chose to reflect on what that experience truly meant, distancing himself from it. The depiction of the military in the video is not merely a documentary recording of what is visible, but rather a reinterpretation through Park's personal perspective—a portrait of the young soldiers within that space.

The following year, Park presented Mirror Organs: A Play of Metonymy (2017) at the Korea Artist Prize exhibition at MMCA. This work, too, originates from the artist's personal experience within the unique collective environment of the military. The installation consists of robotic soldiers armed with K2 rifles, repetitively performing uniform military drills in a vertical space 14 meters high, with lighting reacting to their movements.

As the audience steps into the space between the robotic figures, they are confronted with the shadow of themselves reflected on the massive vertical wall. At a certain moment, the robots, which had been pointing their rifles toward the sky, suddenly produce a loud sound and aim their rifles toward the audience. While they appear to move in a uniform, drill-like manner, a closer look reveals that the angle of each rifle is subtly different.

This installation performance, which overwhelms both the auditory and visual senses, induces a momentary sense of fear. Park translates the fear that motivated the movement of individuals within a group—an emotion he directly experienced during his military service—into an artistic, synesthetic expression.

The sensuous scene of robots exhibiting individual characteristics within the group, the audience’s reflections cast as giant shadows beyond the robotic soldiers, and the control boxes with exposed cables resembling veins, serve as a reminder of the individual’s existence within a system of collectivism.

In this way, the works of Kelvin Kyungkun Park capture the world as seen from his own senses and perspective within the collective and relationship-oriented context of East Asian society. The world he reinterprets through his sensory experience using digital media originates from the artist's inner world, yet it resonates with the inner worlds of those of us living in the same era.

"I believe that a good artwork is primarily seen with the eyes but ultimately felt with the body. I want to evoke physical experiences and make the body remember, so that the audience reacts with their bodies, not their heads.

The power of contemporary art, I believe, lies in experiencing the artwork through its image, movement, color, texture, and rhythm, which offer an immediate experience that is different from text, even without explanations or background knowledge." (Kelvin Kyungkun Park, The Stream Interview, October 6, 2015)

Kelvin Kyungkun Park graduated from the Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and received his master's degree in Film & Video at the same university. Since his first solo exhibition in 2013, his works have been shown at various international venues such as Busan International Film Festival, Berlinale, HotDocs, New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Taipei Biennale, and Sharjah Biennale. His recent major solo exhibitions include “When Tigers Used to Smoke” (2022) at OCAT Museum, Shanghai, “Double Mirror” (2020) at the Shanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai, China.

Park is the winner of Berlin International Film Festival’s NETPAC Award (2015), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art’s Art Spectrum award (2016), Busan Film Festival’s best documentary award (2018), and a nominee for MMCA Korea Artist Prize 2017 and BMW Art Journey (2021) as well as being selected for Chanel x Frieze Now & Next (2022).

References

• 박경근, Kelvin Kyungkun Park (Artist Website)
• 올해의 작가상 2017, 박경근 (Korea Artist Prize 2017,  Kelvin Kyungkun Park)
• 서울독립영화제, 박경근 – 청계천 메들리 (2010) (Seoul Independent Film Festival, Kelvin Kyungkun Park - Cheonggyecheon Medley (2010)) 
• 아트인컬처, 탁영준 - 박경근 〈철의 꿈〉, 한국의 산업화를 이끈 선봉장, ‘철’의 영상 미학, 2014.11.07
• 대전일보, "다양한 각도로 미술의 재미 찾길", 2020.11.02
• BAZAAR, 박경근과 이유성이 말하는 예술가의 삶, 2022.09.28
• 더 스트림, 철에 대한 개인적인 그리고 압축된 시공간의 꿈: 박경근 _Interview, 2015.10.06